The Cathedral and the Bazaar

The situation that Eric Raymond describes in the beginning of his essay seems familiar: A programmer becomes interested in enhancing some small aspect of a project and eventually winds up involved in the whole thing. While his story about his own development strengths and weaknesses and the charisma a leader has to have to get a project going is somewhat interesting, the later half of the essay is more so. It describes how once a project reaches a critical mass of developers, people will code for it because they enjoy contributing something to the community. While each individual programmer may want to work on a certain problem that interests them, I think the desire to contribute ensures that they also work on whatever part of the project needs attention. I think that the essay accurately addresses, in broad terms, several important principles that make the open source community work.