From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Laura Creighton Message-Id: <200103081523.QAA17408@boris.cd.chalmers.se> To: okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp Cc: 9fans@cse.psu.edu, lac@cd.chalmers.se Subject: [9fans] The Cathedral and the Bazaar Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 16:23:42 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6d8a5d38-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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