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The essay contrasts two different Free Software development models:
  • The '' Cathedral '' model, in which Source Code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of Developer s. GNU Emacs and GCC are presented as examples.

  • The '' Bazaar '' model, in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public. Raymond credits Linus Torvalds , leader of the Linux kernel project, as the inventor of this process. He also provides anecdotal accounts of his implementation of this model for the Fetchmail project.


The essay's central thesis is Raymond's proposition that ''"given enough eyeballs, all Bugs are shallow"'' (which he terms Linus's Law ): if the source code is available for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, then bugs will be discovered at a rapid rate. In contrast, Raymond claims that an inordinate amount of time and energy must be spent hunting for bugs in the Cathedral model, since the working version of the code is available only to a few developers.

The essay helped convince most existing open source and free software projects to adopt Bazaar-style open development models, fully or partially — including GNU Emacs and GCC, the original Cathedral examples. Most famously, it also provided the final push for Netscape to Open The Source of Netscape Communicator and start the Mozilla project.


The Cathedral is also the typical development model for Proprietary Software — with the additional restriction in that case that source code is usually not provided even with releases — and a common usage of the phrase ''"the Cathedral and the Bazaar"'' is to contrast proprietary with open source (Raymond has used it this way himself, ''e.g.'' in the Halloween Documents ). However, the original essay concerns itself only with free software, and does not address proprietary development in any way at all.

The terminology has been extended to describe non-software projects. Wikipedia is a Bazaar-style project, while Nupedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica are Cathedral-style projects.

When O'Reilly published the book in 1999, it achieved another distinction by being the first complete and commercially distributed book published under an Open Source Document License .


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