Comment by rektide
2 years ago
Still I think incredibly useful frames for interpetting the world.
Society so visibly can see & understand Cathedral entities. And we still are so weak at grokking the rhiziomatic Bazaar assemblages that happen.
2 years ago
Still I think incredibly useful frames for interpetting the world.
Society so visibly can see & understand Cathedral entities. And we still are so weak at grokking the rhiziomatic Bazaar assemblages that happen.
The frame largely already existed, though, even in software, e.g., "Worse is Better" (https://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html).
Worse is better is a discussion on system design. Both parties represented in worse better are implicitly cathedrals: both are singular actors, both with the same value system even (Simple, Correct, Consistent, Complete).
None of this embodies the Bazaar to me. The spirit of diversity, chance, chaos, & above all the pluralism: the ability to get Perl style post-modern in approaches, is largely absent from the WIB discussion.
The Bazaar is multisystem, multi-agent, in a way that most people building software don't tangle with. It's fundamentally different if you can encompass much more than yourself, than any one effort.
The Cathedral & The Bazaar is a book that should make these kinds of distinctions in thinking abundantly apparent. Few of us can ever really experience or witness the Bazaar. It's too vast. The book gives us an impressive tale, where we can begin to see wide exploration & reasoning occuring far beyond the scales that even the biggest boldest widest orgs on the planet can see.
Well, very clearly "The Right Thing" (i.e., MIT school) is the approach used when building a cathedral and I don't think it's that far of a leap (especially, anyone who could read this essay in 1999 was intimately familiar with the Cold War, in part a struggle of planned economies vs market economies, and there's a bit of The End of History triumphalism here).
The cathedral and the bazaar may be a memorable metaphor, but the essential ideas (rationalism vs empiricism) are ancient.