Just about everyone who spends any time studying open source is familiar with Eric S. Raymond’s “[The Cathedral and the Bazaar] (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain).” So familiar that both are generally known by abbreviations: esr and CatB respectively.
To recap, it was a ground breaking essay written in the mid nineties that really drew attention to how novel the development of the Linux Kernel really was, and outlined a number of powerful “open” development practices that--because of the Internet--changed the way that the open source was able to function. It’s a powerful essay, and my own interest in the direction that open source takes, stems directly from the ideas that esr presents here.
The biggest problem with the CatB argument is that it’s wrong.
Strictly speaking, not wrong, so much as a bit logically fuzzy. What I mean, is that the argument tends to be a bit too idealistic and a bit too broad. So that, when working in its legacy it becomes (more) difficult to reject some of the assumptions that esr takes for granted.
This isn’t really a fatal problem: movements need documents and essays that are powerful and idealistic, and I think insofar as CatB encouraged the free software and open source movement to adopt more distributed and “open” practices, it was wildly successful.
As the foundation of an intellectual study… it’s less good. I do think that it would be useful--for me, for other people--to think about the nuisances that esr avoided, and thinking about ways that we can build upon those arguments.
1. Examine the role of “commiter” rights, or “core” teams on the development process. While these “institutions” might not have the same sort of effect that outright “cathedral building,” has on an open source project, but all projects have this sort of top-down organizing influence, and it’s important to consider.
2. Consider “distribution,” and “federation,” of both ownership and process, in open source. This means think about source management strategies (I think git is really important here) and the role of having a code base that’s owned by one person/company/institution (a la GNU, Mozilla, and so forth) and the effect that having ownership be distributed (like the Kernel and many smaller projects.)
3. Think about modular design and extensibility. I had a conversation with Dan in the comments of my essay on innovation, and he brought up extensibility, which is worth bringing up again in a new context. Though its not a new idea, it’s possible to write software so that nearly all of the customizations that a user might want to do are possible through an add-on system. Emacs has emacs-lisp, TextMate exposes the shell in the editor (and the bundles make TextMate very open-source like), firefox has extensions, Drupal has modules. I think these kinds of designs have a big impact on the kind of involvement an open source community is likely to develop.
Have I missed anything?
Onward and Upward!