On open source software and the organization of cathedral-building: metaphors and realities

Eric S. Raymond’s (1999) influential essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar paints contrasting pictures of the orderly, hierarchically controlled programs of planning and execution that built the great cathedrals of Europe, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ferment and seeming chaos of the bazaar. The latter then is offered as a metaphor for the mode through which free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) is developed. Numerous commentators have express dissatisfactions with “the bazaar,” but this note argues that both sides of the metaphorical juxtaposition are misleading: large open source projects in some significant respects resemble the medieval mode of cathedral-building, because the latter was not so orderly and hierarchically structured in their planning and execution, whereas the former appear to devote considerable attention to mechanisms of governance and control.