bazaar

n.,adj. In 1997, after meditating on the success of Linux for three years,
the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture
and development models titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The main
argument of the paper was that Brooks's Law is not the whole story; given
the right social machinery, debugging can be efficiently parallelized across
large numbers of programmers. The title metaphor caught on (see also
cathedral ), and the style of development typical in the Linux community is
now often referred to as the bazaar mode. Its characteristics include
releasing code early and often, and actively seeking the largest possible
pool of peer reviewers. After 1998, the evident success of this way of doing
things became one of the strongest arguments for open source.

