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Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

While Apple would certainly like you to believe that the image of iOS sprang, fully-formed, from the mind of Steve Jobs like some sort of medieval cathedral, the reality is anything but. In fact, much of Apple's success is due to the extent to which it functions like a confederation of very well funded startups. Cupertino is very much a bazaar, wherein a shopper with very refined tastes (Jobs, for example) can pick and choose the finest wares.

This article concludes that quality only happens if someone takes responsibility for it. Yes. You'll find no argument on that point from me. But cathedral's are not (edit: should say "not only") about one person taking responsibility for quality. They are about a priori design.

Quality control can happen ex post facto but creativity, once strangled, dies.

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I'm going to drop the cathedral and bazaar analogy, because I don't feel like debating the exact meaning of the terms.

It seems to me that quality is about having someone on the top who is willing to give direction and vision to a project, instead of having every person who scratches their own itch full influence. Contributors are great. But letting everyone pull in their own direction doesn't lead to something that feels well engineered.

PHK seems to be calling this vision and cohesive design (a-priori or not) the "cathedral model". I agree strongly that for a project to work well and feel "high quality", it needs some source of a unified idiom.

The problem is that coherent vision and a prior design are NOT equivalent. Obviously, I cannot know what was going through the head of ESR when he wrote the original essay, but what I've always taken from it is that a priori design is inherently inflexible, prone to becoming disconnected from reality, and ultimately less inviting to creativity.

If the suggestion of the article is that the only way to retain quality is to move back to the "single vision" world of a priori design, I'm sorry...that ship has sailed, the cat is out of the bag...whatever your favorite analogy, PHK is very right that the new generation has gotten used to not having instructions handed to them.

Of course, anyone is free to start a project with a single vision, recruit new members, and do their best to grow the project. I suspect, however, that such an effort would loose out to one that figures out how to develop a coherent vision without the need for a priori design.

Brooks spends some time discussing these issues in the book, and I'm pretty much aligned with him:

Nobody belives in "a priori design" and I somehow doubt that anybody did. Brooks points out that the original publication of the "waterfall model" was meant as "how not to..." and people got that wrong.

But cathedrals are not about a priori design, they are about style, elegance, economy of means and coherency of design.

But my point in the piece is that the lost generation doesn't even know what a cathedral is in the first place, having grown up in the bazaar.

But did they grow up in the Bazaar? or in the Mad House?

ESRs original prototype for the "Bazaar" was Linux. Do you feel that Linux is lacking in coherency of design? You refer to the dot-com bubble, but the problem with the bubble wasn't, I think, that it was the "Bazaar". Indeed, I don't think the dot-com bubble of the late 90s was characterized by much open source development at all!

It was, rather, consumed with "flashiness" and "wow factor". I definitely see the continued obsession with these things as a problem. I would say that, for example, much of the obsession with Node.js today is a consequence of this obsession. But that isn't a Bazaar.

It's a disco.

Can I, the customer, pick and choose the finest wares? If not, it's not a bazaar.

The original essay is about how you build a cathedral versus how you build a bazaar, not what you use them for.

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