The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

Open Source software development tends to be like a Bazaar. Many different people meet together to do what they are interested in. The software is released rapidly with many people helping to fix problems. Traditional corporate development is more like a cathedral. People are working under a top down structure to produce something. Individuals are not necessarily working optimally.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an important work in the history of computer development. However, it feels somewhat dated today. Most of the examples given in the book are from the 1990s. Today things have evolved to a "corporatization" of the open source development. Most cell phones are based on the open source Android operating system. Most browsers are based on open source webkit. While the sources are available, it is difficult to contribute and even build the product. The commonly used version often also have bits of proprietary components. Even more "open" projects like the NodeJS language have many hoops required to actually contribute. (I ran into those as I tried to fix a bug a few years back.) However, repositories like Github make it super easy to fork. If a maintainer goes silent or doesn't want your change, you simply fork and anybody  can find your version and use it. Things are both more Cathedral and more Bazaar at the same time.