The Cathedral and the Bazaar

1. According to the text, "the Bazaar" style is "Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise" (Raymond). To the opposite, "the Cathedral" style of software development should be quiet, working until everything is done, and give out a final release.

2.To make a bazaar-style project work successfully, Raymond mentioned a lot of important issues. The programmers interest and attitude should be good. The program code should be well shared and reusable. The user and tester should be treated as valuable as possible. And the most important thing: the releases and feedbacks should be treated as fast as possible. In one word, "Do as the user needs".

3.I think Raymond specified on the user quite much. As I see, this is quite different in bazaar style programming and cathedral style programming. In the bazaar style, if there is a new user request, it is handled by the world or lets say, by the internet. And even only some users' requests might be important for many other users might have the same need. But in cathedral style programming, most programmer or programmer groups are handling one specific user, which might be a company or organization or else. They may have some requests, which turned out to me not really what they want. So they may change their idea, which is pretty frustrating sometimes. Raymond didn't mention a lot about why the user is so important for the bazaar style, but it is true.

4.Based on the bazaar style's specialty, I think some smaller, common, widely used, not-too-complicated, core-based softwares would work out better in the bazaar mode. If it is like this, it can be modified by more people and tested by more people.

5.Large, complicated, used by specific users, these might be the softwares that would like to be in the commercial development style. Which is more organized and payed for these extra-large programs