Reading 07: My blog name is slightly relevant



In my experience, the bazaar is superior to the cathedral in terms of development models, simply because of the greater freedom allowed in it. While the advantage of a cathedral type system of open source software development should be that you have a small group of people that are able to intimately collaborate and decide the future of a project, allowing for more focused programming, the truth is that the bazaar has this too, just not officially. In any bazaar type open source project, you eventually end up having a few “power developers” who take an interest in the software to a far greater extent than anyone else, which leads to them developing more and naturally taking on a guiding role for the software, such that they build a community (which while open to all is of course dominated by “power developers”), in which they are able to plan for future features and the further development of the software similar to the “small group of mages” that are prevalent in cathedral development while still having the benefits of having a large group of “helper developers” (developers who do not contribute major resources but are still helpful in fixing/reporting bugs, developing minor features, and providing feedback) given by bazaar development. 


A good example of this in action is Wikipedia, which was inspired by the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. For example, in Wikipedia a small group of editors (they do it for free) is responsible for the majority of edits. 60% of users in Wikipedia (those who have created an account) never edit again 24 hours after their first edit. Power editors in Wikipedia do not guide features, but they do have substantial control over controversial topics, especially those political or of historical controversy, to the point where some topics have changes auto rolled back, or subject to approval by approved submitters. Similarly, the vast majority of “helper editors” in Wikipedia simply fix grammar/spelling, add hyperlinks, or reword information without adding much new context. 


I think the truth of the open-source vs closed-source debate is somewhere in the middle. I don’t think closed-source will ever go away, simply because of commercial pressures - there is this idea that you can’t make money off of open-source software (and it’s pretty true, aside from donations/support it’s difficult to monetize open-source and goes against the idea of it anyways). Large companies will never fully embrace open-source because of that, at least until they can find some way of monetizing it that they think will be better for business than closed-source. However, we’ve seen that in many areas open-source has thrived recently - lots of companies are now open-sourcing part, if not all of their code (Microsoft Loves Open Source), and the ideals of open-source are spreading to areas outside of software development (see the Wikipedia example earlier). I think the future of software development will likely be a hybrid of both open-source and closed-source software, as the market shows that open-sourcing some areas of your code can be compatible with making smart business decisions, rather than keeping it all closed-source.

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