The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Eric Raymond's essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" gives insights into the software development process. He argues for the effectiveness of the bazaar model of software development where the entire community can participate in the development of the software at every stage and new releases are made frequently. In the cathedral model the development process is restricted to a small group of developers and only made available to the public after each release. Clearly the bazaar model has the potential to turn out new releases faster and get more people involved in a project with a desire to work on it. Eric Raymond pointed out the importance of the social side of developing an open source project. The manager has to lead the development in the project and put everyone's contributions together. This seems like the obvious way to get quality software, but there are many challenges that keep the ideal development methods from being put into action. The biggest obstacles to quality software development are most likely to be getting people interested in working on your project and putting everything together to make the software do what you want it to.