But there is a more fundamental error in the implicit assumption that the cathedral model (or the bazaar model, or any other kind of management structure) can somehow make innovation happen reliably. This is nonsense. Gangs don't have breakthrough insights-even volunteer groups of bazaar anarchists are usually incapable of genuine originality, let alone corporate committees of people with a survival stake in some status quo ante. Insight comes from individuals. The most their surrounding social machinery can ever hope to do is to be responsive to breakthrough insights-to nourish and reward and rigorously test them instead of squashing them.
Some will characterize this as a romantic view, a reversion to outmoded lone-inventor stereotypes. Not so; I am not asserting that groups are incapable of developing breakthrough insights once they have been hatched; indeed, we learn from the peer-review process that such development groups are essential to producing a high-quality result. Rather I am pointing out that every such group development starts from-is necessarily sparked by-one good idea in one person's head. Cathedrals and bazaars and other social structures can catch that lightning and refine it, but they cannot make it on demand.
Therefore the root problem of innovation (in software, or anywhere else) is indeed how not to squash it-but, even more fundamentally, it is how to grow lots of people who can have insights in the first place.
To suppose that cathedral-style development could manage this trick but the low entry barriers and process fluidity of the bazaar cannot would be absurd. If what it takes is one person with one good idea, then a social milieu in which one person can rapidly attract the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of others with that good idea is going inevitably to out-innovate any in which the person has to do a political sales job to a hierarchy before he can work on his idea without risk of getting fired.
And, indeed, if we look at the history of software innovation by organizations using the cathedral model, we quickly find it is rather rare. Large corporations rely on university research for new ideas (thus the Halloween Documents authors' unease about Linux's facility at coopting that research more rapidly). Or they buy out small companies built around some innovator's brain. In neither case is the innovation native to the cathedral culture; indeed, many innovations so imported end up being quietly suffocated under the "massive level of management" the Halloween Documents' authors so extol.
That, however, is a negative point. The reader would be better served by a positive one. I suggest, as an experiment, the following:
Pick a criterion for originality that you believe you can apply consistently. If your definition is ``I know it when I see it'', that's not a problem for purposes of this test. Pick any closed-source operating system competing with Linux, and a best source for accounts of current development work on it. Watch that source and Freshmeat for one month. Every day, count the number of release announcements on Freshmeat that you consider `original' work. Apply the same definition of `original' to announcements for that other OS and count them. Thirty days later, total up both figures.
The day I wrote this, Freshmeat carried twenty-two release announcements, of which three appear they might push state of the art in some respect, This was a slow day for Freshmeat, but I will be astonished if any reader reports as many as three likely innovations a month in any closed-source channel.
[EGCS] We now have history on a project that, in several ways, may provide a more indicative test of the bazaar premise than fetchmail; EGCS, the Experimental GNU Compiler System.
This project was announced in mid-August of 1997 as a conscious attempt to apply the ideas in the early public versions of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The project founders felt that the development of GCC, the Gnu C Compiler, had been stagnating. For about twenty months afterwards, GCC and EGCS continued as parallel products-both drawing from the same Internet developer population, both starting from the same GCC source base, both using pretty much the same Unix toolsets and development environment. The projects differed only in that EGCS consciously tried to apply the bazaar tactics I have previously described, while GCC retained a more cathedral-like organization with a closed developer group and infrequent releases.
