Time and the bazaar

Father time is a trickster

Time is a funny thing. A minute is just a minute, but “Just a minute” could be an hour. What feels like an hour working on a computer is actually 3, and then oh look it’s 4 am and you have to be out the door at 6:30 am.

Some things feel like they take too much time, and then others feel like there isn’t enough time in the world for them. In the end though, time is finite. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Time helped this guy forget the unpleasant bits and pieces of the old world, gray beard days. Ignore the mixed points there and focus on the love of the old in the post, and you’ll see what I mean. Some of his points are valid, maybe someone at mozilla is intrepidly fixing his libtiff issue as I type this. That’s just an example. I don’t know that it’s a good example though. Regardless it really isn’t a good point about bazaar working or not working, it’s just some random bug he uncovered.

Welcome to the land of the new…old..new?

The bazaar shines in situations where you want new people to show up, regardless of their experience. When you’re working on something like an IM client, you can’t possibly know every aspect of every protocol, plus all of cocoa and carbon, plus all of objective-c, plus a whole lot more. Of course greenhorns show up, but that’s the point isn’t it? People who want to learn show up, they learn, they gain experience. Those aspects of the bazaar are not addressed that blog post on acm.

The cathedral has its place as well. For projects that do not want simple drive by development. People who want to stick around with a project for a very long time flock to both cathedral and bazaar projects, but it seems as though on the cathedral side they have a bit more fun. People aren’t nitpicking their code as much maybe, but who really knows. Or it could just be the groups I’ve dealt with. Regardless, cathedral works. Bazaar works.

Maybe the author really just wanted some focus on the part of all projects. Maybe some standards that aren’t in place. Regardless, I don’t see the bazaar magically disappearing just because of a single blog post on acm that offers no real solutions, just a hodge podge of unrelated points that do not present a cohesive problem, just a lot of small problems that almost seem related.