Class notes on: "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."

The "cathedral vs. the bazaar", also known as CatB, is an essay on software engineering methods by Eric S. Raymond (from Wikipedia, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"). The essay describes two contrasting free software development models: Cathedral (in which source code is available with each software release, but not code developed between releases, which is restricted), and Bazaar (in which source code is developed over the internet). The author's main point of the essay is that bugs in a given code are discovered and remedied much more readily when the developing source code is widely available to public scrutiny, as in the Bazaar model. (As opposed to the Cathedral model, which is much less open to public scrutiny and testing during closed development.) The author's arguments helped instigate a move in existing open source/freeware projects to Bazaar-style open development models, including some projects which had previously been more Cathedral-style. A full (open publication license) text of the essay is available online at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/.