Thanks to the friends of Canaima GNU / Linux we learned that May 27, 2022 marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of one of the fundamental texts to understand free software. The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S Raymond.
Why The Cathedral and The Bazaar?
In the book, Raymond talks about two models of software development
…the “cathedral” model, applicable to most of the developments carried out in the world of commercial software, as opposed to the “bazaar” model, more typical of the Linux world.
In the first chapter, the author explains what led him to write the book
By the time Linux popped up on my radar screen in early 1993, I had already been involved in Unix and open source development for ten years. He was one of those who first contributed to the development of GNU in the mid-XNUMXs. He had released a respectable amount of open source software online, developing or co-developing several programs (nethack, the VC and GUD modes of Emacs, xlife, and a few more) that are still widely used today. He thought he knew how it was done.
Linux turned a lot of what I thought I knew upside down. For years he had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping, and evolutionary programming. But also he believed that there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized and planned approach was needed from the start. I thought the most important software (operating systems or really big tools like Emacs) they needed to be built in the manner of cathedrals, to be carefully assembled by wizards or small bands of sorcerers working in splendid isolation, with no test versions being released before the time was right.
Linus Torvalds development style – test early and often, delegate as much as possible, be open to the point of being promiscuous – was a real surprise. Nothing to do with the silent and reverent construction of a cathedral — the Linux community, by contrast, seemed to resemble a great bustling bazaar with different agendas and approaches (adequately reflected by the Linux software repositories, which welcomed contributions from anyone) from which It only seemed possible for a coherent and stable system to emerge through a succession of miracles.
You can get the book for free here