Open Source Weblog

According to Carr, the success of Linux, when compared to the problems that have faced Wikipedia, shows that the Bazaar approach is not enough to ensure the success of a project.

“If Raymond made a mistake in his paper, it was in drawing too sharp a distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar. They’re not two different and incompatible approaches to innovation. Their relationship is symbiotic. Without the bazaar, the cathedral model moves too slowly. Without the cathedral, the bazaar model lacks focus and discipline,” Carr writes.

His general perspective is that while the open source model works well at improving on existing projects (Linux on Unix, Firefox on Netscape) where there is a strong leader it struggles to create new projects from scratch without a genius at its centre.

“The open source model is also unlikely to produce the original ideas that inspire and guide the greatest innovation efforts. That remains the realm of the individual,” he adds.

The article has, not surprisingly, drawn a number of responses. Matt Asay, for one, is sold on the idea.

“As Nick points out (and quotes me to this end), software development is not an either/or decision between the cathedral and the bazaar - it is a symbiosis of the two. Eric Raymond writes that ‘The individual wizard is where successful bazaar projects generally start,’ and it's almost certainly true that it's also where successful bazaar projects generally end. The cathedral is useful for starting and polishing projects - the bazaar is helpful for assembly, editing, bug fixing, and a certain amount of core development work. You need both. Not a lonely cathedral, nor a chaotic bazaar. You need both to temper the weaknesses (and strengths!) of the other,” he writes.

Not everyone is as convinced, however. Over at 'Confused of Calcutta', JP Rangaswami raises “a mid-sized ‘but’":

“We shouldn’t dismiss lightly the propensity for open source to innovate, to augment innovation and to accelerate innovation, for the following reasons:The diversity inherent in the crowd creates long-tail effects, and this causes the bazaar to come up with stuff that the cathedral wouldn’t consider; in cases where the cathedral does consider the innovation, the bazaar is often faster and cheaper; and finally, while tight coordination by central authority seems a worthwhile thing, we should not forget the number of camels designed by committees. In fact that’s one of the key stanchions of opensource communities. They don’t do camels,” he writes.

Meanwhile, Glyn Moody believes that Carr has overlooked a fundamental difference between open source software and open content:

“I think this misses a key point about the difference between open source and open content that has nothing to do with authority. Software has clear metrics for success: the code runs faster, requires less memory, or is less CPU-intensive, etc. There is no such metric for content, where it essentially comes down to matters of opinion much of the time,” he writes.

While Krishnan Subramanian dismisses Carr’s article almost entirely:

“The weakness of Wikipedia lies not in its open source approach but in its accessibility to the much wider audience with absolutely no barrier on the entry. This cannot be considered as a weakness in the open collaboration process itself. Rather, the weakness is due to lack of participation of enough experts in the Wikipedia itself,” he writes. “The flaw in the execution of an approach should not be construed as a flaw in the approach itself.”

The comparison between Linux and Wikipedia is indeed tenuous, but it is just a small part of the argument itself. What interests me is the theory that the community model is not good at creating projects from scratch. Does anyone have any examples to the contrary?