The cathedral plus the bazaar: Open source and Apple (design) envy

Posted Wed, 01/07/2009 - 16:48 by lior.kanfi
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An excellent blog post which debates and disscuses, how open source can make better products based on Apple model.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10274039-16.html?part=rss&tag=feed&sub...

Comments

by tulipmrk - 10/07/2009 - 12:57

I still think of my self as an artist of sorts. A good web design site should look nice, it should be artistic. But not as dramatic or profound as a painting. Don't totaly dismiss the artistic side.

by adi - 10/07/2009 - 15:29

I think Matt Asay didn't bother to read the book...



Cathedral & Bazaar

  • The cathedral is a near-perfect building that takes a long time to build. Once built, it stays unchanged for a long time.
  • The bazaar, by contrast, is adapted and extended each day by the people working in it.



    • In Eric Raymond’s work the bazaar is a metaphor for open-source software development.

    Linux Kernel (by Linus Torvalds) and Fetchmail (by Eric Raymond himself) are two of the software projects given as examples.


    One important fact to pay attention to is that both Linux and Fetchmail went public only after they had strong designs ready (based on Unix and popclient), and were carefully coordinated along they way by Linus and Raymond. The design and coordination were major factors to these projects success.



    My point is that open-source already follows the Cathedral & Bazaar, a fact that makes this quote "The key, however, is learning to tweak open systems in the short term to be competitive, too, and that, I believe, requires a "cathedral+bazaar" approach to open source" a bit problematic...









    by neta.zmora - 28/09/2009 - 21:15

    It is true that Android (and Android Market) is behind Apple's OS X iPhone, but the gap is being closed quickly. The author of the blog, IMHO, is confusing open source in general and open source for mobile devices (particularly mobile OSs).
    * MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices), netbooks, Internet Radios, DPFs (Digital Picture Frames), Infotainement devices, etc. are extremely price sensitive and an open OS is a FREE OS. FREE as in beer, not as in freedom. Only after you've spoken to a few OEMs, can you understand how important this is.
    * Out-of-the-box Android has a pretty ugly GUI. So does Windows Mobile. Both are customizable.
    * The blog author spends a lot of time speaking about GUI. Mobile device users are concerned about GUI, but also about battery life, Wifi range, audio quality, UI speed, and so on. This is where each device manufacturer differentiates his (open source) product.

    Just look at what HTC did to Android with its HTC Hero (http://www.htc.com/www/product/hero/overview.html) and HTC Tattoo (http://www.htc.com/www/product/tattoo/overview.html). Great products based on the open source Android and that rival the iPhone.