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Linux: "The Cathedral & The Bazaar"

Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system in 1991 by taking tools from the GNU Project and building an open-source, Internet-centered operating system. Linux grew rapidly due to its open development model that encouraged contributions from volunteers worldwide. By 1995, an open-source software community had formed around Linux. In 1997, Eric Raymond published "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which compared traditional closed software development to a cathedral and open-source development to a bazaar. The paper argued that the distributed, open-source approach could yield higher quality software. Under the term "open source" proposed by Raymond, the movement gained widespread adoption in corporations during the late 1990s dot-com boom. By 2003

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83 views2 pages

Linux: "The Cathedral & The Bazaar"

Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system in 1991 by taking tools from the GNU Project and building an open-source, Internet-centered operating system. Linux grew rapidly due to its open development model that encouraged contributions from volunteers worldwide. By 1995, an open-source software community had formed around Linux. In 1997, Eric Raymond published "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which compared traditional closed software development to a cathedral and open-source development to a bazaar. The paper argued that the distributed, open-source approach could yield higher quality software. Under the term "open source" proposed by Raymond, the movement gained widespread adoption in corporations during the late 1990s dot-com boom. By 2003

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Linux

By 1991 Internet access had become sufficiently common that e-mail could


knit together a large worldwide community of volunteer developers and
function as an effective distribution medium for software. The FSF and the
386BSD project were slow to grasp these possibilities. Linus Torvalds, a
student at Finland’s University of Helsinki, stepped into the gap. Using the
GPL and programming tools from the GNU Project, in 1991 he announced an
Internet-centred effort to develop a PC UNIX of his own—Linux.

Linux was the first major Internet-centred open-source project. Torvalds


encouraged contributions from everyone and issued updated releases of the
kernel (the UNIX-like operating system at the core of Linux) at an
unprecedented pace—weekly, sometimes even daily. The developer
community around Linux grew with astonishing speed, absorbing refugees
from the stagnation of the HURD project and the legal uncertainties
surrounding BSD. By 1995 what would later be called the open-source
community had become aware of itself as a community, and it increasingly
adopted Linux as a common platform.

“The Cathedral & The Bazaar”


In 1997 computer programmer Eric Raymond (the author of this article)
proposed a new theory of open source in his paper “The Cathedral & the
Bazaar.” Raymond compared the centralization, secrecy, slow release tempo,
and vertical management of traditional software development to a cathedral
with its top-down hierarchal structure; the decentralization, transparency,
openness, and peer networking of the Linux community he likened to a bazaar
with its give-and-take negotiations. The paper advanced reasons that the
bazaar-like distributed approach to software development could be expected
to yield higher-quality software.

Where Stallman had framed his argument primarily in moral terms


(“information needs to be free”), Raymond spoke in terms of engineering,
rational choice, and market economics. He summed up his argument with this
maxim: “Given a sufficiently large number of eyeballs, all [computer] bugs are
shallow.” In early 1998 Raymond proposed the term open source as a
description of the same community practices that Stallman had previously
promoted under the free software phrase. With Raymond’s proposal—and
replacement of the label free—came a new program of outreach to
corporations and the media.

Under the open-source banner, the movement made huge strides during the
“dot-com boom” of 1998–2000, and it kept those gains in the stock
market bust that followed. By 2003 early doubts about whether open source
could be the basis for a viable business model had been largely resolved. The
open-source community’s commercial partners included both midsized firms
with community roots (such as Red Hat Software, Inc.) and large corporations
(such as IBM and the Hewlett-Packard Company) intent on capturing
the efficiencies and marketing pull of open source.

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