Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:24:06 -0700 (PDT) | From | KMF AV <> | Subject | Closed-door development |
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http://www.softpanorama.org/OSS/index.shtml
CatB in a new light This fall Raymond has been touring Europe promoting his book. He most kindly made his way by Trondheim where he gave an unforgettable series of speeches. In one of these speeches he poses the question why nobody had articulated the bazaar mode of development prior. He says there are a handful of intelligent, articulated hackers that had already observed the phenomena, but none had spelled it out. Why is that? Raymond asks. His suggestion is that hackers like to think that their success in developing software is due to their own brilliance. All hackers liked to think so, and that is why nobody had tried to look into the matter more closely before Raymond did.
Let's permutate Raymonds question a bit, and ask: why is it that the hacker community is not questioning the apparent flaws in the 'Cathedral and the Bazaar'. Paul Feyerabend writes:
There comes then a moment when the theory is no longer an esoteric discussion topic for advanced seminars and conferences, but enters the public domain. There are introductory texts, popularizations; examinations questions start dealing with problems solved in its terms. Scientists from distant fields and philosophers, trying to show off, drop a hint here and there, and this often quite uninformed desire to be on the right side is taken as a further sign of the importance of the theory.
Unfortunately, this increase in importance is not accompanied by better understanding; the very opposite is the case. Problematic aspects which were originally introduced with the help of carefully constructed arguments now become basic principles; doubtful points turn into slogans; debates with opponents become standardised and also quite unrealistic, for the opponents, having to express themselves in terms which presupposes what they contest, seem to raise quibbles, or to misuse words. Alternatives are still employed but they no longer contain realistic counter-proposals; they only serve as a background for the splendour of the new theory. Thus we do have success; but it is the success of a manoeuvre carried out in a void, overcoming difficulties that were set up in advance for easy solution. (1993, p. 30)
Answering almost with Raymond's own words: can it be that we hackers like to think that the success of our software is due to a genial, new way of development that we have come up with ourselves? Is it truly so? CatB is not a software engineering essay. It is an anthropological study. However, it contains material about the bazaar, the hackers' way of doing software engineering. Central traits to the bazaar is the open process, the freedom to do with the code what each individual developer wants, and a high degree of cooperation. Raymond mentions Linux as an archetypal bazaar, yet in a letter to the author David Miller, a central Linux developer, writes:
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 18:40:06 +0200 (CEST) From: David S. Miller
\> is it so that you \> core Linux kernel developers are doing much of the discussing and \> planning outside of the Linux kernel mailinglist?
It is true to a large extent, and in my opinion it's the gem that keeps us at such high productivity rates.
It's a surefire method by which us core developers can obtain the best signal to noise ratio. Discussions happen more efficiently and productively when you know you're talking to someone with a clue and you don't get barraged with responses from folks who are perhaps not so clueful and not so weathered on the topic as the core developers. I.e. there is a mismatch between the map and the terrain, the map here being Raymond's bazaar and the terrain being how things work in the real world. While there is an open forum, areas for community building, the development in itself is being done in a closed fashion. The results, i.e. the source code, is up for public review, so the product itself is still open. The process, however, is a closed one, and it is the process more than the product that Raymond emphasize as the bazaar model.
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