XGL and The Bazaar Myth

Message ID: 360754

Posted By: deepdistrust

Subject: XGL and The Bazaar Myth

The OSS advocates vax eloquent about how the collaborative development model leads to superior quality software. 'Babbling bazaar of different agendas and approaches' is how Eric Raymond describes the open source method. The rule is you should release early and often so you can incorporate the community feedback early into the development.

A look at many of the open-source programs actually suggests that bazaar model leads to awful software.

First of all, the method reads like an exercie in Extreme Programming, where there is little design, and the program is kind of grown as time elapses. Little upfront design means no clear direction, and the programs can get quite unwieldy. (e.g. the fat Linux kernel resembles its "fat, drunken-looking" penguin logo so much these days!)

Second, the (evolutionary) design-by-committee leads to a program that attempts to do a lot of different things, and ends up doing none of them well. Many semi-functional programs that ship in a Linux desktop distribution fall in this category.

Third, even little things take a lot of time due to wrangling between parties. Again, examples abound in the open source world.

Novell seems to agree: they developed xgl in the cathedral style with no community involvement! They tried to be nice and pass this off as an exception, but what they said amounts to "designing with the community wastes a ton of time!" Considering that design is the part that is supposed to benefit the most from the bazaar style of development, they exposed the bazaar myth for what it is, a myth!

This Yahoo! SCOX Message Board post has been licensed for copying and distribution under the following license:

CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.