And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. But the most interesting feature of the Open Source Software development process, for us Year 2000 litigators, is that the rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see source code and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits. The reasons why Open Source Software works and produces reliable code were analysed initially by Eric Raymond in ' The Cathedral and the Bazaar '. In 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Raymond anatomised a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some of his surprising theories about software engineering which had been suggested by the history of the development of the Linux operating system. The developers are in control of their projects and are keen to make them work.
Good programmers know what to write.
Because all developers in an Open Source environment always have access to entire source all the time they are more likely to reuse code than in a more traditional development. Widely available open source reduces search costs for finding a particular code snippet. Human beings in Open Source Projects work smarter by reusing code rather than writing it afresh. This leads to leaner, more elegant and more reliable software. If many people are using the same code for a variety of different purposes it is likely that in the course of their development work any bugs in the code will manifest themselves.