Midjourney Prompt: “people shopping in a lively bazaar, cathedral towering in the background”

I came across a really interesting piece on GitHub README about the realities of open source projects.

If someone says “open source project” to you, you probably think of developers collaborating on GitHub.  A group of people leads the project, pull requests come in and are merged, and the project benefits from the “many hands” style of bazaar development.

Turns out the alternative – the Cathedral – is preferred by many open source projects.

Cathedral?  Bazaar?  The terms come from Eric S. Raymond’s 1997 book on software development.  He contrasted two models:

• the Cathedral, where source code is available with each release, but between releases it’s worked on by a small, exclusive group
• the Bazaar, where current source code is always available

Both of these are true open source development.  It’s just a question of how many cooks are let into the kitchen.  While the Bazaar model has been wildly successful – the Linux kernel, BSD projects, etc. – smaller projects sometimes suffer under it.

Why?  The overhead.  Here’s a quote from Ben Johnson, the author of BoltDB:

“…I found that accepting and maintaining third-party patches contributed to my burn out and eventual archival of the project,” he wrote. “Even small contributions typically required hours of my time to properly test and validate them. I am grateful for community involvement and when folks report bugs or suggest features. I do not wish to come off as anything but welcoming, however, I’ve made the decision to keep this project closed to contribution for my own mental health and long-term viability of the project.”

The more people you involve, the more time is consuming doing:

• patch or feature validation
• test cases for the patch
• talking with people
• arguing with people
• explaining why feature X was rejected by Y was accepted
• updating documentation
• updating tutorials

…etcetera.  There’s a lot more good stuff in the article, so if you’re interested in software development or open source projects, it’s worth a read.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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