"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" features 19 "lessons" learned by
Eric Raymond (
ESR) concerning
open source development (the "
bazaar") and contrasting it with the current style, done
commercially by relatively small development teams. The writing centers around his own open source story developing a program now called
Fetchmail, and he parallels his story with
Linus Torvald's
Linux.
The "lessons" he enumerates are of dubious quality and range from somewhat useful ("To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you"), trite ("If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you"), and irrelevant to the discussion ("Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around").
For a work which is reportedly one of the seminal writings on open source development, this is somewhat disconcerting to me.