Just taken on its merits, I think a case can be made that this is one of the most overrated pieces of technical writing of the last 25 years. What's true in it isn't interesting ("the importance of having users", "release early release often") and what's interesting isn't true ("Linus's law" being perhaps the most notorious example). Much of the insight is taken directly from Brooks. The whole piece has as its backdrop the development of Fetchmail, which is not a well-regarded piece of software.
What's notable about Cathedral is its timing; it did capture the zeitgeist of what was an important moment in the computing field, the moment where we transitioned from 386bsd-style hobby projects to an industry run on free and open source software. But Raymond isn't the reason why any of that happened, and much of his description of that moment is faulty; the rest of it is just a retrospective of the engineering decisions involved in the writing of a midlist mail processing utility (fetchmailrc syntax, password encryption, the now-largely-irrelevant distinctions between MDAs and MTAs).
Even the high-level organizing notion of "cathedrals" and "bazaars", which should have been a lay-up, hasn't really proven out.
What's notable about Cathedral is its timing; it did capture the zeitgeist of what was an important moment in the computing field, the moment where we transitioned from 386bsd-style hobby projects to an industry run on free and open source software. But Raymond isn't the reason why any of that happened, and much of his description of that moment is faulty; the rest of it is just a retrospective of the engineering decisions involved in the writing of a midlist mail processing utility (fetchmailrc syntax, password encryption, the now-largely-irrelevant distinctions between MDAs and MTAs).
Even the high-level organizing notion of "cathedrals" and "bazaars", which should have been a lay-up, hasn't really proven out.