“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.
The next best thing to
having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
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- Eric S.
Raymond, 1997