How the Cathedral Embraced the Bazaar, and the Bazaar Became a Cathedral

Over the past 20 years, open source has become a widely adopted approach to develop software. Code repositories provide software to power cars, phones, and other things that are considered proprietary. In parallel, proprietary development has evolved from rigid, centralized waterfall approaches to agile, iterative development. In this paper, we share our experiences regarding this co-evolution of open and closed source from the viewpoints of tools, practices, and organizing the development work, concluding that today’s bazaars and cathedrals have much more common characteristics than those that separate them.

In 1997, Eric S. Raymond [1 ] juxtaposed two ways of software development: the cathedral and the bazaar. The differences of the two have from the beginning been in the development approach instead of the source code alone. The cathedral model develops the software within a closed group of developers, and the product is only released in structured intervals; in contrast, the bazaar keeps the development process fast and visible to any interested party all the time.

Originally, the bazaar marked open source, and the cathedral proprietary. Over time, things have changed however, making proprietary development resemble open source software and its development models. In parallel, open source has grown to the level of importance where it has adopted many of the centralized development schemes traditionally associated with proprietary software. Moreover, open source quality increased year after year [2 , 3 , 4 ], and producers started to apply similar marketing models of proprietary [5 ]. As a result, companies started to consider open source as trustworthy of proprietary ones [6 ], and opening proprietary software has become a viable option [7 , 8 , 9 ].

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