# Honoring Eric Raymond's Contributions to open source software and building upon his work

###### tags: `Thought Writing`

Eric Raymond has been a software developer since the 1980s. He was involved with the development of the Linux operating system kernel from 1991 to 1994. He was also one of the founders of the League for Programming Freedom, an organization opposed to U.S. legislation that would have banned certain types of computer programs.

### The Cathedral and the Bazaar

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a book by Eric S. Raymond which discusses how the open source movement has affected software development. The book is a collection of essays that provide an inside look at the Linux and open-source world.

The title is derived from Raymond's assertion that open-source software development is like an "accelerated bazaar process" as opposed to the more traditional "cathedral" style of closed-source development. The cathedral-style development process is one where a single, central authority - such as a corporation's management - directs and controls all the design and implementation work, often resulting in products that are "predictable, consistent, and of high quality."

### Lessons for creating good open source software

*Note: we should create our own lessons for good open source software that we can version publicly*

Raymond points to 19 "lessons" learned from various software development efforts, each describing attributes associated with good practice in open source software development:[\[3\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#cite_note-3)

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

Good software starts by addressing somebody's needs.

2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

5. Plan to throw one \[version\] away; you will, anyhow (copied from Frederick Brooks's _[The Mythical Man-Month](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month "The Mythical Man-Month")_).
6. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
7. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
8. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
9. [Release early. Release often.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often "Release early, release often") And listen to your customers.
10. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
11. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
12. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
13. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
14. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
15. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. (Attributed to [Antoine de Saint-Exupéry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry "Antoine de Saint-Exupéry"))

17. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

The nature of open source software lends itself well to this phenomenon

18. 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!

19. When your language is nowhere near [Turing-complete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness "Turing completeness"), [syntactic sugar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar "Syntactic sugar") can be your friend.

21. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

21. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

#### 22. 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.

Leadership is about inspiring people to do their best work, because they want to, not because you're forcing them to.

Leadership is about getting the best out of people and it is more about inspiring and motivating people than it is about coercion. It is not about making someone do things that they don't want to do, but rather about helping them to do things that they are not yet able to do on their own.

Leadership is about getting people to commit to a shared goal, and this commitment should be voluntary. This means that you have to be able to inspire people and motivate them in order for them to want to go along with your plan.