Earlier this week, I came across a 2012 article from Poul-Henning Kamp entitled “A generation lost in the bazaar“. This is a reference to Eric S. Raymond’s seminal The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which advocates for making the sausage, so to speak, in public. Using the Linux kernel and his own fetchmail program as examples, Raymond emphasizes the benefits of rapid, iterative development and of fostering a user community that acts as co-developers. This stands in contrast to the “cathedral” style of development where a product is worked on by a small number of people until it is ready to be revealed to the public.

Kamp’s point (and subtitle) is “quality happens only when someone is responsible for it,” which I endorse wholeheartedly. However, he is mistaken to blame Raymond’s bazaar for “a clueless generation of IT ‘professionals’ who wouldn’t recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it.” What he observes is the democratization of programming, which is due to ever-cheaper hardware, free (as in beer) software, and the Internet. Had The Cathedral and the Bazaar never been written I doubt the world would look dramatically different, at least in this respect.

IT is in its awkward teenage years. It has been around long enough that it can do pretty cool things, but not so long that it has accumulated much wisdom. The fact that anyone can write software (or copypasta snippets from various example sites and fora) and make it available to others is simultaneously a wonderful and terrible thing. Nonetheless, that doesn’t make the bazaar style wrong.

Kamp described the end result of the bazaar as “a pile of old festering hacks,” and I’ll agree that its an apt description for a lot of software. It’s probably just as apt for a lot of software developed in the cathedral style. Raymond devotes a fair portion of his book to quality and good design, and it’s unfair to blame him for people not following that part (assuming they’re even aware of his work at all).

Raymond makes many unsubstantiated claims that the bazaar style of development leads to higher-quality software. That may or may not be the case. My own view is that the bazaar style is well-suited for open source projects. After all, open source is about more than code.