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People tend to think bazaar == open source, and cathedral == proprietary, and for many projects the design process is more bazaar than cathedral. But almost any
by SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
People tend to think bazaar == open source, and cathedral == proprietary, and for many projects the design process is more bazaar than cathedral. But almost any large open source project is cathedral, or more like, Democratic Centralism. I guess in people's defence, these cathedral projects in the open source world tend to follow totally bespoke procedures that don't necessarily align with those of another project, so it can be a pain or intimidating to try and learn the bespoke incantations for every project you want to submit a patch to.
- samatman 2y agoIt's true, they do tend to think that. Which is too bad, because The Cathedral and the Bazaar has very little to say about proprietary software. esr's type-case for Cathedral development is GNU software, and the Bazaar is Linux. FOSS is 100% determined by the license under which software is released. Several notable open source projects, Lua and SQLite leap to mind, are entirely closed-development. Others are pure anarchy, most are somewhere in the middle. The polemic which coined these terms was mainly making a case that the bazaar model is surprisingly effective and worth considering, a controversial claim in its day, but no longer so.