“The Cathedral and the Bazaar”

A key text for those studying the social politics of the open-source software movement, Eric Raymond's “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” inspired Netscape to publish the source code of its Navigator 5.0 Web browser in 1998. Originally released over the Internet as a single essay in 1997, Raymond expanded his material into a book of the same name in 2000.

“What are we to think,” a New York Times article asked, “when elite programmers … donate their precious time to develop software anyone can use without charge?” Eric Raymond set out to answer this question and others in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” comparing his personal experiences developing an open-source program called sendmail to a more well-known story: the development of the Linux operating system. Linux is a free version of Unix, begun in 1991 when the program's creator, Linus Torvalds, began inviting collaborators all over the Internet to help design an operating system with their volunteer labor. Today, Linux runs one-sixth of the business-server computers in the United States, and is considered by many to be superior to market giant Microsoft's NT.

Before Linux, Raymond confessed, “I believed that the most important software needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with not a beta release before its time.” By comparison, he points out, the Linux movement resembled not so much a cathedral as a “great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches … out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.” Raymond confessed that he knew Torvald's axioms—“release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity”—worked. He just couldn't figure out why they worked. Like many programmers before him, Raymond believed in “Brook's Law,” which states (in plain vernacular) that too many software cooks spoil the development stew. However, Raymond realized, “If this were the whole picture, Linux would be impossible.”

In 1996, Raymond decided to consciously run the development of the open-source software called fetch-mail using the Bazaar style. Invoking psychologist Gerald Weinberg's work in “egoless programming,” [Page 60]Raymond discovered that people will often provide huge amounts of intellectual labor without thought of profit if they perceive that their reputations within the community will be enhanced as a result.

Raymond, who makes a point of identifying himself in interviews as a Libertarian, argues that the Bazaar philosophy can flourish quite naturally and comfortably within capitalist market economies. Certainly, this argument played a big role in Netscape's 1998 decision to make public the source code for its Web browser, and even Microsoft admitted in its leaked “Halloween” memo that “commercial quality can be achieved/exceeded by [open-source software] projects.”

With that said, Raymond's ideas have drawn criticism as well. Jonathan Eunice points out that Raymond too often casts software development as either open-source or commercial, when generally a mix of the two styles is what is needed. For example, although Microsoft is “the company many love to hate,” Eunice notes that its Redmond development model actually emphasizes things like quick turnaround, modular construction techniques, a large and active user base, and many entities striving to improve a product in a thousand parallel dimensions—all hallmarks of the Bazaar. Others have pointed to the irony of First World programmers naively celebrating a term strongly associated with the Third World when, for programmers in developing nations, leisure time to participate in the open-source community is possibly the scarcest commodity of all. There are, however, a number of active open-source undertakings in a wide variety of languages that Microsoft currently doesn't address, such as Icelandic.

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