The Bazaar or The Cathedral ???

An exemplified example of The Bazaar Model is the Linux operating System which was built by contributions from an informal community of volunteers having different agendas and approaches. This is completely in contrast to the way a sophisticated software is built where a small group of developers work in an isolated Cathedral.

The Open source model did come into being with the advent of the Internet when communities with similar interests could really meet virtually and puttheir minds to good use. It opened up a whole treasury of ideas coming out from people and innovation was no more to be tried in insolation.

Strengths and Weakness !!!

When we consider Linux, it's an example of a very high quality Operating System which could run for a long time on the system without crashing. Lot of volunteer developers keep looking out for ways in which they can enhance the software and improve it by adding more utilities to it but all this is governed by a central authority. There is a strict quality control imposed by a strong central authority which checks for the changes proposed by the developers, since all are welcome to propose changes it being an open source model.

The advantage of this kind of a model is that a large number of people will be able to discover more number of bugs in a shorter period of time whereas a smaller group of people working in an isolated Cathedral type model will take longer and may not be efficient in discovering most of the problems.

At times, such kind of an approach may lead to lose out focus on quality. A very easy example of this is the giant online Encyclopedia "Wikipedia". It's again an achievement of the Open Source Movement where the Internet members write on the topic which interests them.This led the enyclopedia to become big and that too at a very quick pace. Unfortunately, the articles were poorly written and weren't well organized. The reason for this is that there isn't any editorial filter like the strong central authority ensuring high quality in case of the Linux operating system. It's no doubt a more democratic process but the quality of the product suffers.

The DEBATE :-)

Peer production is a good way to generate raw material for innovation since the many involved would think alike but it doesn't seem well suited to deliver a final product. One can test, debug and improve in The Bazaar but a task is best done in a closed collaborated group of individuals working in the Cathedral as it enables to deliver the perfect finished product without developing intricacies by going stray from the point of focus.