This week we looked into the concept of the cathedral and the bazaar (and the coffehouse). I think these concepts are pretty interesting and provide two different ways to approach software development, that each have their own advantages and disadvantages. I think the open and iterative nature of the bazaar definitely reflects in FOSS projects, though I think just because a software is open source doesn’t mean that it can’t lean more towards the cathedral setup. For example in our group project, although anyone can submit a PR to preswald, it is a centralised project in the sense that the submission needs to be reviewed and approved by a moderator.

During our discussion on wednesday, a few of the sayings we talked about resonated with me. For example, one of my recent contributions to preswald was adding a feature that displayed latex functions. At first Jared and I were planning on creating a new widget, but then realised that we could do it much more efficiently by modifying the existing text function and allowing it to handle latex input, both inline and block form. I was reminded of this when we discussed the idea that “Good programmers know what to write, but great programmers know what to reuse.”

We also looked at a third concept introduced by Claude Warren: the coffeehouse. It represents a collaborative model where organizations and their OSPOs, come together to share knowledge, resources, and strategies for managing open source software. It introduces a cooperative framework that advocates for a community-driven approach to open source governance. I think if we look at Google, for example, their OSPO has provided clear policies and tools that have helped the development of projects such as tensorflow and go.