[9fans] The Cathedral and the Bazaar

[Laura Creighton <lac@cd.chalmers.se>]

Eric Raymond (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr) wrote an article.  It became a
book.  You can read about it at his web site if you want.  You can even
read the whole article if you want, but I will summarise here in case
you don't want to.  It is very very very famous and influential
in the open source community; many people, I think most people would say that
it is the foundation document of the open source software movement.  In
this document Eric Raymond compares writing software to how he believes
Europeans made Cathedrals, and how Bazaars operate.  Cathedrals are made
by a small group of people with a plan.  They have the vision and they
control everything.  If you like what they do, fine, if you hate it, you
are stuck.  Bazaars are different.  There you get everything offered for
sale. Some is good, some is  not so good, but the important thing is that
it is there.  You can buy anything, take home and modify it if isn't too
your liking.  Lots and lots of people will do this, which is a very good
thing.  The more people you have working on a problem the better.
Catherdral makers are elitist.  Elitism is bad.  Linux is cool because
it is made with the Bazaar and not by Elitist Cathedral makers.

What is astonishing is that European cathedrals were not made this way
at all.  What happened was quite often only done by the vaguest of plans.
What really happened is this:

Somebody went to some place that was building a catherdral and went
home saying, ``Wow, this is *very* cool, I want to make one as well.''
People who mostly had only one occupation in those days, farmer, got to work
weekends on making a cathedral.  Lots of them thought that cathedral
building was much more fun than farming.  The Church people said that working
on cathedrals was Holy and Good for you.  Since the mathematics of
architecture was just getting worked out, a lot of buildings fell over
in the middle of construction.  Some people got rich going from town
to town advising people on how to make buildings that do not fall down.
Some of the advice consisted of which prayers to say on which days of the
year.  If you took their advice, and your building fell down, you could
start over, or sell the rubble to the people in the next town who needed
the pieces for, guess what, their cathedral.  

Eventually we get a whole lot of nice cathedrals, some of which have been
made of rocks that have been part of a half dozen or more failed cathedrals.
We call the ones that are left over really cool and do not even think about
the failures.

This, I submit, is *exactly* the way the open source community operates. 

Laura Creighton