Lessons from the Cathedral and Bazaar Essay

The first lesson mentioned in the essay is, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” I actually don’t like this aphorism and most aphorisms in general because they’re not always true. I think this aphorism is true for large projects that don’t require a lot of specific knowledge.
The problem just boils down to one of labor - hundreds of developers managing convoluted state and reading through lots of dense documentation and code. However, if a project is on the bleeding edge of its field, adding a random sample of 1000 developers does nothing. It boils down to waiting for the three 10x developers to figure it out. We can amend the statement to “Given enough trained eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” But even this is not actionable. Good luck getting 1000 experts to work on the same exact codebase, and by experts, I mean people who can really do things that most can’t. We’re all experts at our 101 courses.

The other relatable lesson is, “Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.” I’ve certainly seen this in the Gleam project. Many new issues come from people who are clearly using Gleam for their own projects. While some just point out what’s broken, others go on and fix it, taking weight off of the core contributors’ shoulders.

I really liked Clause Warren’s Coffeehouse idea—it feels way more realistic than the rigid Cathedral or the chaotic Bazaar. It’s basically saying that real open source happens in those in-between spaces, where people talk, trust each other, and build cool stuff without needing a master plan. It reminds me of how the best ideas often come from side chats, not scheduled meetings. I think OSPOs are super underrated. At a place like Microsoft, they’re kind of like the cool middleman—keeping engineers out of legal trouble while still letting them play in the open source world. Without them, companies would either lock everything down or create total messes trying to contribute.