The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
Just taken on its merits, I think a case can be made that this is one of the most overrated pieces of technical writing of the last 25 years. What&#x27;s true in it isn&#x27;t interesting (&quot;the importance of having users&quot;, &quot;release early release often&quot;) and what&#x27;s interesting isn&#x27;t true (&quot;Linus&#x27;s law&quot; being perhaps the most notorious example). Much of the insight is taken directly from Brooks. The whole piece has as its backdrop the development of Fetchmail, which is not a well-regarded piece of software.<p>What&#x27;s notable about Cathedral is its timing; it did capture the zeitgeist of what was an important moment in the computing field, the moment where we transitioned from 386bsd-style hobby projects to an industry run on free and open source software. But Raymond isn&#x27;t the reason why any of that happened, and much of his description of that moment is faulty; the rest of it is just a retrospective of the engineering decisions involved in the writing of a midlist mail processing utility (fetchmailrc syntax, password encryption, the now-largely-irrelevant distinctions between MDAs and MTAs).<p>Even the high-level organizing notion of &quot;cathedrals&quot; and &quot;bazaars&quot;, which should have been a lay-up, hasn&#x27;t really proven out.