The Babble of the Bazaar

Paul Dillon (dillonph who-is-at northcoast.com)
Wed, 15 Sep 1999 11:08:42 -0700

The processes of abductive multiloguing such as Eva describes in
her paper were succinctly stated on another mailing list to which I belong.
The following comes from a long thread concerning how the specific mailing
list in question be can most adequately adapted to the development of the
LETS community currency model. The example is drawn from the development of
LINUX and Danish wind turbines. The development process in the former
occurs almost exclusively on news-groups (functionally equivalent to mailing
lists).

"Central to the success of Linux and the Danish wind turbines, two
grass-roots technologies that have moved from the fringe to the mainstream,
was information exchange amongst the innovative first adopters. Eric
Raymond, writing about Linux, described this as a "bazaar" development
model-a babbling multitude of agendas and opinions that somehow created a
coherent and stable system. He described the conventional, "for profit"
software development model as cathedral-like-individuals or small bands
carefully crafting something to a plan in splendid isolation and then
handing over the "perfected" product to users who would not allowed to
modify it themselves. I thoroughly recommend Raymond's paper that can be
downloaded from http://ot.op.org/cathedral-bazaar.html#toc14 Do read it, I
believe that the bazaar approach is more appropriate to a grass-root
movement like LETS, and I think this paper has insights that can be
transferred. I think LETS would benefit from a repository and discussion of
best practice. That is best practice in practice, not necessarily best
practice according to the cathedral builders."

The association of the "abductive multilogue" of LINUX development with "a
bazaar" reminded me of Bakhtin's characterization of polyphonic
discourse in relation to similar contexts; e.g., the identification of the
Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel as an instance of the "carnivalized genre of
the menippea". Considering the great fear that LINUX has put into such
cathedrals as Microsoft I think this says a lot about the potentialities of
abductive multiloguing as a Zoped.

Paul H. Dillon