bazaar
:bazaar: n.,adj. In 1997, after meditating on the success of Linux
for
three years, the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper
on hacker culture and development models titled The Cathedral and the
Bazaar (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/). The main
argument of the paper was that Brooks's Law
is not the whole story;
given the right social machinery, debugging can be efficiently
parallelized across large numbers of programmers. The title metaphor
caught on (see also cathedral
, and the style of development typical
in the Linux community is now often referred to as the bazaar mode. Its
characteristics include releasing code early and often, and actively
seeking the largest possible pool of peer reviewers. After 1998, the
evident success of this way of doing things became one of the strongest
arguments for open source
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
Skip to a random entry
Back to Liz's page