OT: "The Ignorance of Crowds" (was: [asterisk-users] OT Slightly: )

[Matthew Rubenstein]

	I see what Dean means about how Digium/Asterisk might have struck a
balance between "the cathedral and the bazaar" antipodes of the SW
development world. Nicholas Carr's "The Ignorance of Crowds" finally
states his "politics" when it says "When you move from the bazaar to the
cathedral, it’s best to leave your democratic ideals behind."

	But treating open/closed source/projects as a pure dichotomy of two
extremes of openness is a purely ideological exercise: and one that
favors the cathedral, the very institution of ideology rather than
practice. There are many degrees of openness, even just in the
categories of the source code and of the project management. There are
degrees of openness in the readability, writeability and executeability
in each of those categories, to extend a metaphor. And there are other
abilities, like redistribution, documentation, training, etc, which can
be open to varying degrees. And any project can mix practically any
openness degree in practically each of those abilities, for a vast
combinatoric range.

	And calling the bazaar "democracy" is to misunderstand, and probably
treat with contempt, both democracy and the *anarchy* of the market.
Even the article's example that Dean highlighted, Wikipedia, shows no
real "democracy", even the pure Athenian version that few Americans
(except maybe some Californians) would recognize. Without actual rule by
all of its contributors and readers, but rather primary rule by many
policies determined and (often) enforced by people selected by autocrats
(however benevolent), it's no democracy, but rather a collegiocracy or
something else with a new name.

	Digium/Asterisk is an interesting example. For example, the community
has so far accepted the proprietary ownership of code contributed to
Digium, but a tension in source code openness lies in that degree in
that category. The recent decision to stop new development of 1.2 in
favor of 1.4 has just begun to enter the community consciousness, but
the state of 1.4 when the 1.2 deadline comes will probably demonstrate
limits of the project's openness to at least some committed 1.2
users/developers. Digium's "Asterisk" trademark hasn't yet become an
issue, AFAIK, but a confusingly named fork, or just competing app from a
different codebase with a very similar name could make all the current
"Aster*" names into precedent damaging to the trademark, if not the mark
itself. Digium is a corporation: an autocracy, not a democracy. It
offers no data to judge democracy in its cathedral ruling its bazaar.
And there are no deductively "identical but for one" versions of Digium
run instead as a democracy to which to directly compare.

	Cathedral/bazaar is not a binary choice. They're more like antitheses
that projects combine into a synthesized community model somewhere in
the sphere of control combinations. It's too early to judge Digium's
Asterisk success, let alone use it as a benchmark to calibrate
cathedral/bazaar combinations. At least we have some terms in which we
can model these complex behaviors and try to compare them. I don't think
either the bazaar or the cathedral is in any way limited by, or alien
to, "democratic ideals". A much more wise politics comes from Yogi
Berra, who said "there is no difference between theory and practice - in
theory". Let's keep trying the best way of running each job, and judge
from the results when we've got examples of each. We can call them names
when they've demonstrated what precedents they're actually like, and who
likes them. What do you think?

 
On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 05:42 -0700,
asterisk-users-request at lists.digium.com wrote:
> Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2007 08:42:48 -0400
> From: "Dean Collins" <Dean at cognation.net>
> Subject: [asterisk-users] OT Slightly: 
> To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion"
>         <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
> Message-ID:
>         <2811A99273243F4E8085696E9B53F430096EB1 at cognationsvr1.Cognation.local>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Interesting article in this months S&B
> http://www.strategy-business.com/press/enewsarticle/enews053107?pg=0 
> 
>  
> 
> Written by Nicholas Carr - The Ignorance of Crowds "The open source
> model can play an important role in innovation, but know its
> limitations".
> 
>  
> 
> At first pass I dissed it and was about to write back to Art Kleiner
> the
> editor about how BAH should stick to what it knows and was about to
> provide references on the Asterisk development as a shining example of
> Open Source at it's best......but when you read it the second or third
> time on the 3rd and 4th page it starts to get interesting.
> 
>  
> 
> Maybe the implementation Digium/Asterisk has struck is a perfect
> example
> of crowd development but with centralized control.
> 
>  
> 
> Anyway I'm throwing it out there for what it's worth and hope it's of
> interest.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Dean Collins 
-- 

(C) Matthew Rubenstein