The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond (top rated books of all time .txt) 📕

This was about as close to a controlled experiment as one could ask for, and the results were dramatic. Within months, the EGCS versions had pulled substantially ahead in features; better optimization, better support for FORTRAN and C++. Many people found the EGCS development snapshots to be more reliable than the most recent stable version of GCC, and major Linux distributions began to switch to EGCS.

In April of 1999, the Free Software Foundation (the official sponsors of GCC) dissolved the original GCC development group and officially handed control of the project to the the EGCS steering team.

[SP] Of course, Kropotkin’s critique and Linus’s Law raise some wider issues about the cybernetics of social organizations. Another folk theorem of software engineering suggests one of them; Conway’s Law-commonly stated as “If you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a 4-pass compiler”. The original statement was more general: “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” We might put it more succinctly as “The means determine the ends”, or even “Process becomes product”.

It is accordingly worth noting that in the open-source community organizational form and function match on many levels. The network is everything and everywhere: not just the Internet, but the people doing the work form a distributed, loosely coupled, peer-to-peer network that provides multiple redundancy and degrades very gracefully. In both networks, each node is important only to the extent that other nodes want to cooperate with it.

The peer-to-peer part is essential to the community’s astonishing productivity. The point Kropotkin was trying to make about power relationships is developed further by the `SNAFU Principle’: “True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth.” Creative teamwork utterly depends on true communication and is thus very seriously hindered by the presence of power relationships. The open-source community, effectively free of such power relationships, is teaching us by contrast how dreadfully much they cost in bugs, in lowered productivity, and in lost opportunities.

Further, the SNAFU principle predicts in authoritarian organizations a progressive disconnect between decision-makers and reality, as more and more of the input to those who decide tends to become pleasant lies. The way this plays out in conventional software development is easy to see; there are strong incentives for the inferiors to hide, ignore, and minimize problems. When this process becomes product, software is a disaster.

Bibliography

I quoted several bits from Frederick P. Brooks’s classic The Mythical Man-Month because, in many respects, his insights have yet to be improved upon. I heartily recommend the 25th Anniversary edition from Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-83595-9), which adds his 1986 “No Silver Bullet” paper.

The new edition is wrapped up by an invaluable 20-years-later retrospective in which Brooks forthrightly admits to the few judgements in the original text which have not stood the test of time. I first read the retrospective after the first public version of this essay was substantially complete, and was surprised to discover that Brooks attributed bazaar-like practices to Microsoft! (In fact, however, this attribution turned out to be mistaken. In 1998 we learned from the Halloween Documents that Microsoft’s internal developer community is heavily balkanized, with the kind of general source access needed to support a bazaar not even truly possible.)

Gerald M. Weinberg’s The Psychology Of Computer Programming (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold 1971) introduced the rather unfortunately-labeled concept of “egoless programming”. While he was nowhere near the first person to realize the futility of the “principle of command”, he was probably the first to recognize and argue the point in particular connection with software development.

Richard P. Gabriel, contemplating the Unix culture of the pre-Linux era, reluctantly argued for the superiority of a primitive bazaar-like model in his 1989 paper “LISP: Good News, Bad News, and How To Win Big”. Though dated in some respects, this essay is still rightly celebrated among LISP fans (including me). A correspondent reminded me that the section titled “Worse Is Better” reads almost as an anticipation of Linux. The paper is accessible on the World Wide Web at http://www.naggum.no/worse-is-better.html.

De Marco and Lister’s Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (New York; Dorset House, 1987; ISBN 0-932633-05-6) is an underappreciated gem which I was delighted to see Fred Brooks cite in his retrospective. While little of what the authors have to say is directly applicable to the Linux or open-source communities, the authors’ insight into the conditions necessary for creative work is acute and worthwhile for anyone attempting to import some of the bazaar model’s virtues into a commercial context.

Finally, I must admit that I very nearly called this essay “The Cathedral and the Agora”, the latter term being the Greek for an open market or public meeting place. The seminal “agoric systems” papers by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler, by describing the emergent properties of market-like computational ecologies, helped prepare me to think clearly about analogous phenomena in the open-source culture when Linux rubbed my nose in them five years later. These papers are available on the Web at http://www.agorics.com/agorpapers.html.

This essay was improved by conversations with a large number of people who helped debug it. Particular thanks to Jeff Dutky <[email protected]>, who suggested the “debugging is parallelizable” formulation, and helped develop the analysis that proceeds from it. Also to Nancy Lebovitz <[email protected]> for her suggestion that I emulate Weinberg by quoting Kropotkin. Perceptive criticisms also came from Joan Eslinger <[email protected]> and Marty Franz <[email protected]> of the General Technics list. Glen Vandenburg <[email protected]> pointeed out the importance of self-selection in contributor populations and suggested the fruitful idea that much development rectifies `bugs of omission’; Daniel Upper <[email protected]> suggested the natural analogies for this. I’m grateful to the members of PLUG, the Philadelphia Linux User’s group, for providing the first test audience for the first public version of this essay. Paula Matuszek <[email protected]> enlightened me about the practice of software management. Phil Hudson <[email protected]> reminded me that the social organization of the hacker culture mirrors the organization of its software, and vice-versa. John Buck <[email protected]> pointed out that MATLAB makes an instructive parallel to Emacs. Russell Johnston <[email protected]> brought me to consciousness about some of the mechanisms discussed in “How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity.” Finally, Linus Torvalds’s comments were helpful and his early endorsement very encouraging.