2.2. How to start a Bazaar-style Project
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"Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."
(Necessity is the mother of invention)
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ESR recommends looking for previous effort and building from there instead of
re-writing your own system from scratch.
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Raymond indeed found several tools that achieved part of what he wished to
do (fetch E-mail messages using the POP protocol) and eventually settled on
contributing to an existing one titled popclient written by Carl Harris.
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Harris noted he lost interest in the project and kindly passed the
maintainer's baton to Raymond. And so Eric started working on fetchpop.