Michael Kesper mkesper@schokokeks.org writes:
Hi,
On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 10:10:54PM +0100, Theo Schmidt wrote:
Carsten Agger schrieb:
Just an observation: While the "Open Source Initiative" may have failed, I did appreciate some aspects of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
I'm not too sure.
- The analogy is false: Cathedrals were built very much like he
describes bazaars.
That's irrelevant to the analogy, since it doesn't compare the building *of* cathedrals versus the building *of* bazaars. Instead, it compares the social activities that *go on within* already-built cathedrals versus bazaars, and the resulting *output* of those societies.
- Development models are orthogonal to the question of whether a
software is free or not.
(The term you want is not “a software”, since the English-language “software” is uncountable like “hardware” or “sand”. Better to use the (copyright-inspired) term “a work”.)
I agree, and that seems to be close to the core of the difference between “open source” versus “free software”: Raymond emphasises the utility of the process as more important than the freedom of the result. I prefer to talk about free software, as I suspect do you.
Note, though, that Carsten's comment still holds: there are many aspects of the essay that are appreciably good.
It's a valuable story and a good analogy for development processes. It shows that free software is *better* at encouraging bazaar-style development, but it doesn't *guarantee* it — as pointed out by its examples of cathedral-style development of free software.