I doubt the dichotomy is between the cathedral and the bazaar. All software projects have a list of gatekeepers or maintainers, who decide which changes should

I doubt the dichotomy is between the cathedral and the bazaar. All software projects have a list of gatekeepers or maintainers, who decide which changes should go in and which ones shouldn't. Some of them have a long list of people with commit access (like Subversion), while others have a handful of maintainers (like Linux). Some of them have grand roadmaps and bug trackers (like Firefox), while others have no agenda or bug trackers (like Git). Some projects have many dependencies, use libtool and a lot of auto-magic (like Subversion), while others are still adamant about not having a configure script, maintaining a handwritten Makefile, and having 1~2 dependencies (like Git). From what I've noticed, as a general rule of thumb, the projects with few strict maintainers are better off than those who give away commit access easily/ have lazy maintainers. It seems obvious when I put it like that. The way I understand it, the cathedral model is about carefully planning out the project, assigning various people chunks of the total work. The bazaar model is open to accepting random contributions from a wider audience, and runs on a looser agenda. It's just that the cathedral model works better for certain kinds of software (games, office suites, professional audio/ video suites), while the bazaar model works better for other kinds of software (web servers, version control systems, development toolchains). When it comes to an operating system, having a curator decide APIs and standards (OS X) certainly wins over an mashup of billions of packages (Debian).