The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Eric S. Raymond ends his article, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" with the following paragraph:
Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or
software "hoarding" is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because
the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude
more skilled time into a problem.[1]
Raymond is stating that open-source will grow to threaten software developed in the "traditional" way, that this
competition will be based on the performance of products developed in the two regimes (rather than on any belief about
morality or ethics) and that open-source will "triumph" in this competition, not in selected areas, but across the board.
These claims deserve to be investigated.
That open-source is a threat to "cathedral" software1 is an established fact.
Microsoft's now notorious "Halloween Document" [2] makes it clear that this cathedral behemoth finds that:
"OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft"2
"OSS is long-term credible"
"The ability of the OSS process to harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the internet is simply
amazing"
It is also clear that (at least in the case of Linux) the success of open-source is a marketplace victory, due to the
quality of the product that it generated. The growing adoption of Linux can not be seen as the result of any
philosophical set of views about whether or not software source code should be free or not.
Yet, while it is clear that Linux is competing well and will continue to do so against Windows, it is difficult to
believe that open-source culture will triumph in the development of every possible type of software application.
A quick, extreme, anecdote will make this point more clear:
My accountant (as I write this, April 15th is looming larger and larger in my mind...) uses a very sophisticated
software tax package to generate my 1040 Forms, Federal and State. Simpler versions of such packages, like TurboTax,
are sold at the retail level. Would hackers choose to develop an open-source tax package? Probably not. And if such a
package existed, would there be demand for it? Would accountants, whose professional reputations ride on every
calculation they make, trust a software package developed in an open-source environment? Possibly not.
It might be more likely that they'd pay money for software developed by experts in tax law who hired programmers,
rather than by programming experts that had a knowledge of tax law.
If open-source can win on the operating systems battlefield, but not in the market for CPA-tax-package software,
it is a reasonable thing to ask:
- Which battles will be won by open-source? Which by cathedral software?
- Can we determine the characteristics of software applications that decide the battle one way or the other?
Can we determine the outcome of each battle in advance, so that the more effective development path is taken and the
battle need not be waged?
1 The terms "cathedral" software, "traditional" software, and closed-source software are
used interchangeably throughout this paper.
2 The terms "OSS", open-source software, and open-source are used
interchangeably throughout this paper.