Day Nine: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Our current assignment is to read Eric Raymond's essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB), which can be found here, and blog our reflections. Having read through the essay in its entirety, I am surprised that Raymond never lists his "lessons learned" all together. The way the text and his stories relate to a specific lesson learned makes sense, but to leave them scattered throughout the text without a single list of every lesson for reference seems strange. Here is a list of every lesson learned for reference:

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.'' (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. ``Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.''
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

That should be all of the lessons that Raymond listed. Every lesson is interesting to me in some way, but lesson five, and the story behind it, reveals a fact that I have only recently come to realize: the community determines the success and the livelihood of the software. This concept is obvious now, but, before I looked over FOSS projects last semester and discovered that some projects have been abandoned and neglected for many years, I never thought of software from this perspective.

Just today, I installed Ubuntu 11.10 on my HP Mini 1125nr and discovered that there is a bug with how the OS handles the monitor backlight. My netbook's screen would go dim and would only turn back on if I reset the computer. After a quick Google search, lessons seven and eight  revealed themselves in a forum topic and a link to a bug report. An initial user reports a problem; several users report having a similar problem; knowledgeable users and/or developers suggest a solution; the bug is fixed in the next release. The bug could have been avoided with more extensive testing before release, but the problem as quickly identified and fixed with the help of "many eyes."

Now that my group is able to compile XBMC from source, I look forward to diving deeper into the community and the software. I am sure that, in my efforts to contribute to XBMC, I will experience something that relates to at least one of Raymond's many lessons. It is important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of open source and learn from these lessons.