The Cathedral and the Bazaar
This was an interesting article; however, I felt it left out much of the good that ‘cathedrals’ bring to society. They do especially well with business applications, and provide the ‘boring’ software that many open source developers do not really want to work on. Contrary to the author’s perception of the world, there is a lot of closed source software that is well-maintained and high quality. I think that quality of software is more dependent on the quality of the developers, designers, and management than the development model used to develop the software. Microsoft produces both good and bad products. So does the open source world. I think both closed and open development models are vitally important.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
