The Cathedral and the Bazaar

I think reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar was great because Eric S. Raymond is speaking straight from experience. He wanted to test the theory of open-source projects to see what Linus Torvalds did right when he created Linux so he began his own project by contributing to Popclient which later became Fetchmail.

I think Raymond really sums-up open-source development with the following:
"While coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which feedback exploring the design space, code contributions, bug-spotting, and other improvements come from from hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people."

He also provides many great tips and lessons that are necessary for the open-source development process throughout his essay. Even though I find all of his thoughts to be very true, I still feel like there are two conflicting ideas. Great projects come from an open-source environment where many people effectively contribute and test the code and then the idea that too many people working on one project can just prolong the completion or success of the project. Raymond stated that "Brooks's Law is founded on the experience that bugs tend strongly to cluster at the interfaces between code written by different people".