Cathedral, Bazaar or College: Reconsidering the E-Gov Open Source Paradigm

The best OSS efforts spring up around problems of compelling technical interest. Web services, system management, office automation and operating systems, function like subject areas in a college curriculum and have already yielded best-of-breed projects. Like classes in a curriculum, each project must articulate a shared objective, which is usually expressed as a desire to demonstrate a capability or service. Success pre-supposes appropriate technical ability and dedication to the articulated goals by at least a sustaining set of participants.

To continue this analogy, just as a curriculum benefits from outstanding faculty, OSS projects prosper by the guidance of benevolent, high-quality technical leadership. In the same way that a faculty body evolves, the best OSS projects incrementally improve by the simultaneous accretion and pruning of the working team over multiple generations. Practicing leaders, like college deans, must nurture collaboration and contribution and organize the constituency of participants. Great OSS deans today include Rasmus Lerdorf of PHP, Guido van Rossum of Python, and, of course, Linus Torvalds of Linux.

Cathedral Model Lacks Flexibility

Some projects are initiated from scratch, but many are born from earlier work. Large-scale software projects may fail if built and maintained using the so-called cathedral model of development because, as Eric S. Raymond (ESR) has famously asserted, its monolithic design and development style is too rigid. Not accidentally, however, some of the most influential OSS projects have actually started out as cathedrals. OpenOffice.org is a large, proprietary product that Sun Microsystems bought in 1999 and turned into OSS. Mozilla is an extraordinarily complex codebase which Netscape re-purposed as OSS in 1998. Clear objectives and discipline in an initial cathedral foundation can result in a successful launch, while the collaboration and adaptability of OSS can guide the subsequent evolution of the project.

Bazaar Model Lacks Collaboration

Contrary to popular wisdom in the OSS community, however, grand OSS projects cannot be built using the alternative “bazaar” model. Actually the bazaar is an improper metaphor. Romantic notions notwithstanding, the principles underlying the fluid market exchange of the bazaar are inappropriate for software development. Essentially the bazaar is an environment of mutual distrust. It is a fiercely competitive marketplace that holds little respect for its consumers or producers, and even less for honesty.

Collaboration, Iteration, Progress

Grand OSS projects demand an unswerving dedication to the pursuit of truth. They are more akin to setting up a college, than working in a bazaar. The explicit goal of a college is to increase the effective knowledge of all participants and to provide the tools needed to accomplish this goal. Within their domains of interest, grand OSS projects aspire to the same objectives and use the same methods. Participants, as colleagues, collaborate about software design and implementation. Details are continuously reviewed, enhanced and pruned. At its best, each OSS project forms an evolving center of knowledge and practice.

This alternative collegiate model fits well for governments who want to explore Open Source methods. It would be foolish for any legitimate government program to be drawn into the chaos of a bazaar model of development. And while it is easy for governments to imagine that their large software requirements can be implemented by cathedral-like building blocks and controls, history is littered with obsolete and forgotten attempts. Chances of success are improved when the government selects a software model which itself embodies collaborative and evolutionary processes of knowledge and technology development. Furthermore, just as OpenOffice.org and Mozilla have proved the success of open sourcing previously closed projects, governments can examine modernizing some of their repertoire of projects by re-purposing appropriate existing projects as open source.