As a computer programmer I am always looking for new ways to help better the programming world and the way that my programs are developed. While reading the essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Raymond, his idea of letting others view a project before it is finished to help in debugging really opened my eyes to open source programming. I am not really a big Linux fan myself, but I do think that having an open source program that allows the whole world to contribute to the debugging process really speeds up the process of fixing problems in the code. Thousands of eyes looking at the code are much better than just having a couple of eyes looking at it.
The only real downside, and probably the reason that most programs are not done as open source projects, is that not as much money can be made. This, as a programmer, is kind of a problem as I am going to be trying to make a living creating projects. With that all aside, I still see that there is a huge benefit to having an open source project, and that the benefits outweigh the money issue for users, because there will be less bugs in the programs that they use. Overall, I think that open source programming definitely serves its purpose and benefits a lot of people.
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