Open source: a symbiotic relationship between the cathedral and the bazaar (Nick Carr)

I just finished reading Nick Carr’s “The Ignorance of Crowds.” [PDF] A great read, and important for those who want help seeing open source’s potential…as well as its limitations.

First, the potential. Nick traces the seemingly unlimited opportunities afforded by this open, peer-based development model, using Eric Raymond as his starting point:

Of course, that thoroughfare wasn’t open only to software engineers. It was open to every person and to every company. The Net brought the bazaar, and its peer production model, right up to the doors of every business in the world. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that Raymond’s metaphor soon came to be applied far more broadly than he originally intended. Connected to the global masses through the Internet, companies no longer had to pursue innovation in splendid isolation. They had the option of replacing the traditional, closed cathedral model with the new, open bazaar model. Michael Schrage noted the importance of this phenomenon in the pages of this magazine back in 2000 (See “Open for Business,” s+b, Fourth Quarter 2000). Open source, he wrote, is “transforming how organizations of all kinds seek to create and manage value. [It] will be central to capturing more profits from innovation.”

Yahoo! Open source is manna from heaven!!!

Not so fast, argues Nick. He suggests that experience has shown open source to be better at optimizing software than innovating it. Of course, this critique is best applied to true community-based development, as corporate open source doesn’t suffer the same constraints. But, by this same token, corporate open source looks a lot like corporate proprietary source, so it’s not clear that innovation necessarily follows from open source….

Nick then digs into the benefits of open source development, and shows how the very strengths underlying it prove to be its weaknesses. Namely, the diversity of interests and loosely-coupled tasks to be accomplished make open source hum on solving large, complex (and modular) problems, but also create three weaknesses:

1. [P]eer production works best with routine or narrowly defined tasks that can be pursued simultaneously by a big crowd of people. It is not well suited to a job that requires a lot of coordination among the participants….

2. [B]ecause it requires so many “eyeballs,” open source works best when the labor is donated or partially subsidized….

3. [M]ost important, the open source model — when it works effectively — is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be.

It’s this last point that I find most interesting. 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.

Great paper, Nick. Thanks for publishing it.