Two governance models for production: closed and planned, or open and emergent, each with characteristic failures.
Raymond's 1997 contrast between the tightly planned cathedral and the open bazaar of Linux development. Each fails differently: cathedrals ship late, bazaars fragment.
In practice
- A company builds its product behind closed doors to a specification and ships eighteen months late; a rival ships weekly to users and is ugly for a year and right by the end.
- A textbook written by one author is coherent and dated; a wiki on the same subject is uneven and current.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline