The strength of the Bazaar mode of the free software (and peer production generally) mode of production, is that people can work passionately at what they do best, when they feel best about doing so. But not all work in a software project is pleasant, yet it needs to be done, and sometimes development needs leadership and vision.

In a much talked about article in the FOSS community, from Patrick MacFarland at the Free Software Magazine, the argument is made that hybrid modes of production, using a measure of centralized ‘Cathedral’ like management (the metaphor is from the landmark book of Eric Raymond, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, which contrasted centralized and decentralized modes of software development), might actually be better.

Excerpt:

"As a strength, this allows any individual to hack on any feature, any program, any anything and scratch his/her proverbial itch on whatever is bothering him. In this way, we often get interesting solutions to interesting problems. The worst bugs are fixed, the most wanted features are added, and the most annoying of either are dealt with in a quick and painful hacking session that often involves swearing like a drunken pirate.

However, as a weakness, this also means that leadership in some projects is non-existant or ineffectual. In Cathedral-style projects, your not-so-friendly neighborhood PHB (fueled by the lies from various ugly hunch-backed minions), although wrong 120% of the time, says what goes in a project. The PHB’s vision is corrupt; but none-the-less, it still is a vision.

Now, some Bazaar-style projects do manage to wing it fine. The Linux Kernel itself is a good example, with Linus Torvalds acting as a benevolent overlord. He allows just the right amount of free-form hacking to go into the kernel, and refuses to commit patches that don’t provide 100% useful content.

Other projects, however, are glowing examples of what not to do. GNOME, sadly, is one of those projects. Backed by the Free Software Foundation and the FOSS community as a whole, the GNOME project for many years just added lots and lots of feature creep and otherwise unnamed bloat. They seem to be digging themselves out from under that, but they have a long road ahead of themselves.

The GNOME project lacked true vision for those years, and feature creep and other long term development problems rushed in to fill that hole. Problem is, many projects are just like GNOME. Incidentally, few Cathedral-style projects suffer from lack of vision: those that do simply die off and are never heard from again. Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time, where it is vastly expensive for a Cathedral-style project to do the same.

Another example: for years, XFree86 languished under the control of David Dawes (who also proved earlier on that a benevolent overlord actually has to be a benevolent), and Keith Packard had to go ahead and fork XFree86 (producing X.org, the now de facto X server for most Linux distributions) to solve this issue. Not only did Dawes lack vision, he got in the way of everyone who did have vision."

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