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In 1997, Eric S. Raymond wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In this book, Raymond makes the distinction between two kinds of software development. The first is the conventional closed-source development. This kind of development method is, according to Raymond, like the building of a cathedral; central planning, tight organization and one process from start to finish. The second is the progressive open-source development, which is more like "a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and appr

Open-source software development can be divided into several phases. The phases specified here are derived from Sharma et al. A diagram displaying the process-data structure of open-source software development is shown on the right. In this picture, the phases of open-source software development are displayed, along with the corresponding data elements. This diagram is made using the meta-modeling and meta-process modeling techniques.

Several types of open-source projects exist. First, there is the garden variety of software programs and libraries, which consist of standalone pieces of code. Some might even be dependent on other open-source projects. These projects serve a specified purpose and fill a definite need. Examples of this type of project include the Linux kernel, the Firefox web browser and the LibreOffice office suite of tools. Distributions are another type of open-source project. Distributions are collections of

It is hard to run an open-source project following a more traditional software development method like the waterfall model, because in these traditional methods it is not allowed to go back to a previous phase. In open-source software development, requirements are rarely gathered before the start of the project; instead they are based on early releases of the software product, as Robbins describes. Besides requirements, often volunteer staff is attracted to help develop the software product base

Communication channels

Developers and users of an open-source project are not all necessarily working on the project in proximity. They require some electronic means of communications. E-mail is one of the most common forms of communication among open-source developers and users. Often, electronic mail

Version control systems

In OSS development the participants, who are mostly volunteers, are distributed amongst different geographic regions so there is need for tools to aid participants to collaborate in the development of source code. During early 2000s, Concurrent Versions System was a prominent exa

Bug trackers and task lists

Most large-scale projects require a bug tracking system to keep track of the status of various issues in the development of the project. Some bug trackers include: 1. Bugzilla – a web-based bug tracker from Mozilla. 2. Mantis Bug Tracker – a web-based PHP/MySQL bug ...