Editing The Cathedral and the Bazaar (section)

==Lessons for creating good open source software==

Raymond points to 19 "lessons" learned from various software development efforts, each describing attributes associated with good practice in open source software development:<ref>{{cite web|last=Raymond|first=Eric Steven|title=The Cathedral and the Bazaar|url=http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html|access-date=18 April 2012}}</ref>
#Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
#Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
#Plan to throw one [version] away; you will, anyhow (copied from Frederick Brooks's ''[[The Mythical Man-Month]]'').
#If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
#When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
#Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
#[[Release early, release often|Release early. Release often.]] And listen to your customers.
#Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
#Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
#If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
#The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
#Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
#Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. (Attributed to [[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]])
#Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
#When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
#When your [configuration] language is nowhere near [[Turing completeness|Turing-complete]], [[syntactic sugar]] can be your friend.
#A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
#To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
#Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.