12 Great Quotes from “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”

The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a famous essay by Eric S. Raymond, has been a great inspiration by many open source software developers. I've read the book about 2 years ago, and liked it a lot that I bookmarked some of the pages that contained some wonderful words of wisdom.

I’m going to share to you a few highly inspiring quotes that I took from The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

1. “I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

2. “Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).”

3. “Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”

4. “If I'm correct, they'll help you understand exactly what it is that makes the Linux community such a fountain of good software - and help you become more productive yourself.”

5. “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”

6. “Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.”

7. “In fact, I think Linus' cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model.”

8. “If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.”

9. “Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.”

10. “Perhaps this should have been obvious (it's long been proverbial that "Necessity is the mother of invention") but too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the Linux world - which may explain why the average quality of software originated in the Linux community is so high.”

11. “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.”

12. “Put that way, the question answers itself. Linus was keeping his hacker/users constantly stimulated and rewarded - stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work.”

13. “If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.”

14. “The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.”

15. “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.”
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