Revisiting The Cathedral And The Bazaar

Nicholas Carr revisits the cathedral and the bazaar in an effort to learn more lessons from a decade dominated by it. It is the 10th birthday of The Cathedral and the Bazaar - a founding document by Eric S. Raymond (ESR) on the open source movement.

It is a very good article which looks at pros and cons of the bazaar approach. The biggest thing to take away from the pros and cons both is

If Raymond made a mistake in his paper, it was in drawing too sharp a distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar. They’re not two different and incompatible approaches to innovation. Their relationship is symbiotic. Without the bazaar, the cathedral model moves too slowly. Without the cathedral, the bazaar model lacks focus and discipline.

I agree in concept. Or I would say that the element of governance should be borrowed from the cathedral model, to avoid chaos. This, I find, is related to what Clay Shirky said about managing communities. However, in my opinion the cathedral model has a heavier participation of closed development, or rather not allowing others to see and contribute. This is what countered by the bazaar, or the open source philosophy. It is the willingness of the software developers to have an open mind to contributions from others.

I also agree with that some tasks are still suitable for an individual, and not a group. Especially the ones which cannot be explained very easily or which have lot of unknown dependencies. This is one of the reasons I feel a lot of early part of projects cannot leverage the open source community. Only after the idea becomes more concrete does the community participations start being a force.

Debugging is an activity discussed a lot in this respect. But I think it is not the only one that should be. One of the effects of open source on a product has been finding new ways of applying it to solve new problems. Something that the developer themselves had not thought of. Not only does the community evolve the software along with it, but it also makes it more generic. In a way, the product can now target a wider set of requirements, something that takes a huge amount of time and effort otherwise. I consider this to be one of the reasons why tools like Wordpress, Drupal and Ruby On Rails have evolved faster to apply in multiple scenarios. This is because the diversity in the community helps in getting different perspectives, not only on solving bugs, but also in evolving a product.

This also leads to the belief that innovation is not limited to individuals. JP says this much better. I think innovations can be offshoots of these evolutions. Of course, ideas usually are born in one brain and discussed by a couple in the beginning. But birth of some ideas are influenced by brainstorming sessions or evolutions of a community. A community might not innovate, but I believe innovations can happen because of the community.