Cathedral vs. Bazaar

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Identification

Definitions/Uses

1999
Reference	/Cubranic, 1999/ Open-Source Software Development
Definition/ Use	In his seminal paper Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond describes the process of effective open software development and likens it to a bazaar ``of differing agendas and approaches'' (p. 2). He contrasts this to the traditional style of software development, which requires more centralized approach, software ``carefully crafted [by individuals or small teams] working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time'' --- an approach he compares to ``quiet, reverent cathedral-building'' (p. 2). A significant point that Raymond makes in his essay, now proven in practice, is that treating the users as co-developers and accepting their contributions is the ``least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging'' (p. 4). This means that people usually contribute new features because adding them would increase program's usefulness to them --- an element of self-interest that can certainly partly explain why many open-source developers volunteer their time to those projects in addition to their regular jobs in the computer industry. Early and frequent releases are a critical part of such development model. Although the early versions are unavoidably buggy, if the project shows potential and generates interest to attract other developers, bug fixes and other contributions will quickly start coming in. It is then crucial to quickly incorporate those improvements and release the new program version back to the community, in order to avoid possible duplication of effort and to keep the contributors both rewarded (seeing the result of their work) and stimulated to continue with their debugging and development. Both ``cathedral'' and ``bazaar'' approaches are used in ongoing open-source projects --- two classic examples of each are Emacs text-editor and Linux kernel, respectively. Something worth noting here, however, is that ``bazaar'' style is not only currently dominant in the open-source development community, but also seems to be more effective. It was at least partly the users' disillusionment with Free Software Foundation's (the organization behind the original Emacs project) attitude towards the development of Emacs (and in particular the perceived arrogance and insistence of its principal developer, Richard Stallman, that he be the sole decision-maker) that led to the split of the development effort into GNU Emacs and XEmacs and somewhat tense relationship between the two camps.

See also

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