What Moves the Bazaar Forward?

Open Source is a reality. It already showed such obvious successes as to make it possible to wonder how far it will still progress, what kind of equilibrium will eventually settle, what our society will look like when this occurs, if it does.

I have already argued that one essential requirement, past the ones set by (misnomer) Intellectual Property, is SCM.

When thinking of the forces driving Open Source, one repeatedly meets however arguments such as the following:

solution must be free or so low cost that management will call it insignificant

This is obviously worrisome to me, as it essentially denies my argumentation. In effect, it states that better than nothing is good enough. It is by such expectations that subversion, for example, qualifies.

I also read the following argument:

Open source communities are amongst the most controlled and enforced development environments that you can find anywhere. How else can the bazaar move forward? They use the power of taboo rather than diktat, when it comes to development.

This certainly is often the case, but I'd deny it is a fatality, and I believe it is a serious limitation to the openness of the (misnomer) sources, and therefore a severe handicap. My understanding is that people expressing this opinion believe in the importance of their main concern, which deserves the benefits of Open Source, but consider that CM is not part of it, and is not critical. Subsequently, they share the former conclusion that any tool will do, and thus also the most traditional, and closed methods.

-- MarcGirod - 25 Feb 2007