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I was always turned off by this book's title. It really doesn't fit at all as a metaphor. In the middle ages, cathedrals were collaborative, public works proje
by Camillo 10y ago
I was always turned off by this book's title. It really doesn't fit at all as a metaphor.
In the middle ages, cathedrals were collaborative, public works projects. A whole city or town came together to build one. People from all social strata donated money or work to build the most splendid building they could. The final result was a public space open to all citizens, with no commercial purpose.
On the other hand, a bazaar is literally a market, where people go to buy and sell their wares. It's all about the profit, not the common good, and it's all about competition, not collaboration.
Even if you want to ignore the entire free software aspect and focus entirely on the pure technical benefits of open source, the cathedral is the far superior artifact from an engineering point of view. And where is the openness in the bazaar? As if the merchant is going to tell you how much he paid for his wares, or how they were made.
- mhurron 10y agoA cathedral was a projection of power of the Catholic Church (later other Churches) over the local population. A bazaar is traditionally open to anyone to come and do their thing. That is where the analogy comes from.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago> A cathedral was a projection of power of the Catholic Church (later other Churches) over the local population. Yeah, like the NFL projecting power over the cities by placing their teams there.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoI like that angle, it's a new way to think about cathedrals for me. With respect to free software though, the pertinent aspect of these architectures is the forkability. Once the cathedral is designed, there is no room for anything off script. You can't have your own services in the cathedral on Tuesday nights. But if you don't like the way your meat lady treats her chickens, you can just open up your own poultry stand across the path from her. There isn't a central plan. The plan emerges from the voluntary action of the participants.
- bhandziuk 10y agoMaybe not from that one product (a single cathedral) but after it has been built knowledge has been gained on how to create flying buttressed, move stone around efficiently, build a foundation, etc. So if you had another large project you could benefit from this gain in societal knowledge.
- smhenderson 10y agoWell the people that built those cathedrals generally kept the techniques of masonry a secret. Sure, people were free to use the fruits of their labors (for various shades of free) but that knowledge wasn't generally made available to all when the cathedral was finished. If you wanted another cathedral you had to go to the same (or similar) people who built the first one. Masons of the time closely guarded their secrets, like source code from a vendor like Microsoft, Oracle, etc...