9. Necessary Preconditions for the Bazaar Style
Early reviewers and test audiences for this paper consistently raised
questions about the preconditions for successful bazaar-style
development, including both the qualifications of the project leader
and the state of code at the time one goes public and starts to try to
build a co-developer community.
It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar
style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would
be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus
didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community
needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.
When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present
is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work
particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly
documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential
co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in
the foreseeable future.
Linux and fetchmail both went public with strong, attractive basic
designs. Many people thinking about the bazaar model as I have
presented it have correctly considered this critical, then jumped from
it to the conclusion that a high degree of design intuition and
cleverness in the project leader is indispensable.
But Linus got his design from Unix. I got mine initially from the
ancestral popclient (though it would later change a great deal, much
more proportionately speaking than has Linux). So does the
leader/coordinator for a bazaar-style effort really have to have
exceptional design talent, or can he get by on leveraging the design
talent of others?
I think it is not critical that the coordinator be able to originate
designs of exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical that
the coordinator be able to recognize good design ideas from others.
Both the Linux and fetchmail projects show evidence of this. Linus,
while not (as previously discussed) a spectacularly original designer,
has displayed a powerful knack for recognizing good design and
integrating it into the Linux kernel. And I have already described
how the single most powerful design idea in fetchmail (SMTP
forwarding) came from somebody else.
Early audiences of this paper complimented me by suggesting that I am
prone to undervalue design originality in bazaar projects because I
have a lot of it myself, and therefore take it for granted. There may
be some truth to this; design (as opposed to coding or debugging) is
certainly my strongest skill.
But the problem with being clever and original in software design is
that it gets to be a habit -- you start reflexively making things cute
and complicated when you should be keeping them robust and simple. I
have had projects crash on me because I made this mistake, but I
managed not to with fetchmail.
So I believe the fetchmail project succeeded partly because I
restrained my tendency to be clever; this argues (at least) against
design originality being essential for successful bazaar projects.
And consider Linux. Suppose Linus Torvalds had been trying to pull
off fundamental innovations in operating system design during the
development; does it seem at all likely that the resulting kernel
would be as stable and successful as what we have?
A certain base level of design and coding skill is required, of
course, but I expect almost anybody seriously thinking of launching a
bazaar effort will already be above that minimum. The open-source
community's internal market in reputation exerts subtle pressure on
people not to launch development efforts they're not competent to
follow through on. So far this seems to have worked pretty well.
There is another kind of skill not normally associated with software
development which I think is as important as design cleverness to
bazaar projects -- and it may be more important. A bazaar project
coordinator or leader must have good people and communications skills.
This should be obvious. In order to build a development community,
you need to attract people, interest them in what you're doing, and
keep them happy about the amount of work they're doing. Technical
sizzle will go a long way towards accomplishing this, but it's far
from the whole story. The personality you project matters, too.
It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like
him and want to help him. It's not a coincidence that I'm an
energetic extrovert who enjoys working a crowd and has some of the
delivery and instincts of a stand-up comic. To make the bazaar model
work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at
charming people.