10 years of the cathedral and the bazaar

10 Years of

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Little Black Rabbit 小兔黑黑

3-Word Intro

Open Source

Participation

Background

In the beginning, code sharing is the norm

In the early 80s, source code became valuable and the Free Software Movement was found to fight against code stealing

The term 'Open Source' was coined in 1998 to promote the idea of Free Software

What is Open Source?

The Open Source Definition (Free Redistribution, Source Code, Derived Works, etc.)

Eric Raymond's “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

First Presented in Linux Kongress May 1997

Extracting key practices from Linux development and applying to Raymond's own project - fetchmail

The standard text on 'How Open Source Development works'

Main Metaphor - Cathedral vs Bazaar

Brook's Law and Egoless Prog.

Brook's LawAdding more programmers to a late project

makes it later

Egoless ProgrammingDevelopers are not territorial about their code,

and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements

(Release early, Release often, Linus' Law)

Motivations

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch

(Networked Individualism (Wellman, 2002))

For the boring task like documentation, a reputation system will help to fill the gap (ego-boosting)

Q1: Are these sources of motivation powerful

enough?

Open Source becomes more mainstream during the last ten years

But Linux does not successfully capture the desktop market

Is there enough diversity in the motivated participants?

Is the reputation system working?

"For me it is," said one developer. "If I don't like something I either don't use it or make it work for me. Yes it's an elitist view, but hey,

you did not pay for us to do this, we were nice enough to even let you download it. Last time I checked we did not have a guy in a dragon suit chasing you down forcing you to install

KDE ;)"

KDEvelopers on KDE users (Powell, 2002)

"I certainly agree with it," wrote another. ". . . No one's paying me, so I'll do whatever I feel like, whether that be hacking Kopete, or doing something completely aimless. If you believe this is a bad point of view to be taking, email me off-list, and we can discuss my attractive

rates and conditions."


" . . . People who do not donate code and just complain about our lack of focus are not

welcome here. . ." said another, who added in a later post, "I can say though that I put pride

in the work I add to KDE. Pride that I feel makes KDE a good DE in my mind. If others like it cool, if not, sucks to be them. Until I get paid to do software for them I dont think they are a very high priority in my hobby."


"Since I don't get paid to work on KDE, that is certainly my view," said a fifth. "I'd be fairly pissed of if someone came critiscising work I

do in my free time because I enjoy it."


Q2: Ego-boosting or Egoless?

Q3: Does the Bazaar, a metaphor obtained from the

Linux development process, an adequate

representation of Open Source?

"BSD builds up a core system which is uniform, whereas Linux distributions takes

pre-existing pieces and pretty much puts them together helter-skelter. Naturally, the BSD method is far more amenable to keeping things ordered, while the Linux method

practically necessitates utter chaos. That's not to say that chaos is inherently bad, or order

inherently good. They're just different environments."

BSD vs Linux: Design Philosophies (Fuller, 2004)

"The differing focus of each of the 3 groups leads them not only to different solutions, but also to different problems. When one of the other projects discovers a similar problem,

they have "prior art" to consider in formulating their own solution. "

(Loli-Queru, 2003)

"In many cases, the code and ideas are shared, in some cases new solutions are attempted.

The reasons for this can vary from the original solution not fitting well into the second

system to wanting to create an independent solution to see if anything can be learned from

the experience, or a better solution found."

(Loli-Queru, 2003)

Q4: After 10 years, do you need a new and better explanation for Open

Source?

Other Models - Commoditization

"It is said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. For those of us in the IT industry, we can add one more to the list:

commoditization."

(open source 2.0, p.91)

Other Models

Heterarchy (Iannacci & Mitleton-Kelly 2005)

Peer Production (Benkler, 2007)

The End

Q?: Is Brook's Law Weakened?

10 years of the cathedral and the bazaar

Technology