March 24, 2005
GLITTER 2005
5
“The Cathedral
and the Bazaar”
Every good work of
software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
Good programmers know
what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
When you lose interest
in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Treating your users as
co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
Release early. Release often. And
listen to your customers.
Given a large enough
beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the
fix obvious to
someone.
- Eric S.
Raymond, 1997