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163<br />
The executive director in question then gave Stallman an ultimatum:<br />
give her total autonomy in the office or she would quit. Stallman,<br />
as president of the FSF, declined to give her total control over its activities,<br />
so she resigned, and he recruited in Peter Salus to replace<br />
her.<br />
When Raymond, an outsider, learned that these people had left the<br />
FSF, he presumed Stallman was at fault. This provided confirmation<br />
for his theory that Stallman’s personality was the cause of any and all<br />
problems in the GNU Project.<br />
Raymond had another theory: recent delays such as the Hurd and<br />
recent troubles such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected problems<br />
normally associated with software project management, not software<br />
code development.<br />
Shortly after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond<br />
began working on his own pet software project, a mail utility<br />
called “fetchmail.” Taking a cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his<br />
program with a tacked-on promise to update the source code as early<br />
and as often as possible. When users began sending in bug reports and<br />
feature suggestions, Raymond, at first anticipating a tangled mess,<br />
found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the success<br />
of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis: using<br />
the Internet as his “petri dish” and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker<br />
community as a form of natural selection, Torvalds had created an<br />
evolutionary model free of central planning.<br />
What’s more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around<br />
Brooks’ Law. First articulated by Fred P. Brooks, manager of IBM’s<br />
OS/360 project and author of the 1975 book, The Mythical Man-<br />
Month, Brooks’ Law held that adding developers to a project only<br />
resulted in further project delays. Believing as most hackers that software,<br />
like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks, Raymond<br />
sensed something revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more<br />
cooks into the kitchen, Torvalds had actually found a way to make the<br />
resulting software better. 3<br />
Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them into<br />
a speech, which he promptly delivered before a group of friends and<br />
neighbors in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Dubbed “The Cathedral<br />
and the Bazaar,” the speech contrasted the “Bazaar” style originated
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