Introduction to Open-Source Hardware for Science - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 3

to hundreds of thousands of programmers debugging, rewriting, fixing, making suggestions
and submitting code. 3 Eric Raymond in the Cathedral and the Bazaar argued that open source
was a fundamentally new way to create and design technology that relied on the “eyeballs” of
the many instead of the minds of the few. Using the cathedral and bazaar analogy, Raymond
claimed that open source, drawing from the rich, nonhierarchical, gift-based culture of hack-
ers, was similar to the bazaar where everyone could access and contribute equally in a parti-
cipatory manner. This type of mass-scale collaboration is driving the success of Web 2.0 ap-
plications that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users (examples include so-
cial networking sites and wikis such as Wikipedia). Wikipedia is a particularly good example
because both the software is open source, as is the development method of the content, which
has proven both accurate [ 8 ] and far superior in terms of both total and up-to-date coverage
compared to conventional for-profit encyclopedia generation as summarized in Figure 1.1 [ 9 ].