Patrice Riemens, an Amsterdam-based people networker and FLOSS-opher is in now Bangalore. Can we plan a meeting with Him? Sunil, Can you communicate with him & arrange it? See an Interesting Post from Him
Anivar
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Patrice Riemens Date: Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 9:13 PM Subject: [Asiasource-l] [F/OSSophy Dept] F/OSS out of the box... To: summersource-l@lists.tacticaltech.org Cc: africasource2-l@lists.tacticaltech.org, asiasource-l@lists.tacticaltech.org
An interesting post from nettime which goes a long way to demystify Eric Raymond's celebrated "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay, and sheds some unexpected light on the differences between Free Software and Open Source. All this even it is primarily written for an artistic/cultural audience rather than for developpers.
Cheers from Amsterdam still, patrizio and Diiiinooos!
(original, see the therad as a whole too...): http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0902/msg00011.html
Hello Donna,
I am looking at open source and implementing this metaphor to a curatorial practice. What effect would this have on exhibiting artists? Would the audience benefit?
There already is a rich tradition of applying Open Source/free software principles to art; "curatorship" seems a bit problematic as a term (which it is not only in this context), self-organization may be more appropriate. Examples can be found in the hack meetings which, particularly in Italy, were hybrids of activist and artistic events, and many related Internet art projects. But actually, the tradition is older than even the terms "Open Source" and "free software". Since Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance School in the 1960s, the Mail Art network had its own codified system of decentralized, international, open participation art exhibitions, events and publications, with the festivals and non-juried exhibitions of older avant-garde movements forming yet another historical pretext.
Also anyone with an interest in Eric S. Raymond?s free software development model.
He pitched it "Open Source" as a more business-friendly term, against the older, more activist term "free software".
I would like to know the following:
1. What are your personal views about the ?Cathedral? and the ?Bazaar??
Again, a lot has already been written about this (for example, in "First Monday" shortly after the Raymond's text appeared). Retrospectively, I think there have been many confusions and urban myths about this essay. Like Roland Barthes' "The Death of Author", it is a text that, polemically speaking, nobody seems to have read yet everybody has an opinion about. Among those urban myths are:
- that Raymond pitches an Open Source "bazaar" model against a proprietary Microsoft-ish "cathedral" model of software development. But in fact, it is about the decentralized development of Linux, the operating system kernel supervised by Linus Torvalds [and not what is commonly referred to as the whole Linux operating system], versus the classical small, closed committee style of development that had been characteristic for GNU software, the free BSDs and the X Window System. On top of that, the text is not even literally about Open Source because the term did not yet exist when it was first published.
- Looking back at the above point more than ten years later, it is probably fair to say that a clear-cut division of "bazaar"- and "cathedral"-style development methods no longer exists in Free Software development. The development of the Linux kernel has become more hierarchical, with several layers of developer hierarchies that a patch needs to go through in order to be accepted into the main line kernel, while on the other hand the development culture of GNU and BSD software has adapted itself better towards the Internet than in the 1990s. (The now-standard use of networked version control systems like Subversion and git is a clear empirical indicator.)
- While not using the term "Open Source" in its initial version, the essay fully preempts the later Open Source-vs.-Free Software controversy by discussing open, distributed development processes as technically superior to closed processes. [There are striking similarities to Bertalanffy's earlier General Systems Theory with its claim that in nature and society, only open systems survive while closed ones die of entropy, and of course to Popper's theory of the open society as the counter-model to societies founded on philosophical idealism.]
I remember an article from the German IT journal iX that, ten years after the manifesto, checked those claims and soundly disputed their black-and-white rhetoric. For example, Open Source and distributed development are clearly not a 100% cure against software bugs and security leaks (as opposed to Raymond's statement that "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow). There have been terrible bugs and security nightmares - such as the recent Debian OpenSSL bug - even in high profile FLOSS software projects. And the dialectics is also true: If there are not enough eyes, bugs can be annoying, for example in FLOSS multimedia authoring software from Cinelerra to PD that thrive on very small and often amateur programmer communities (as opposed to the OS kernels, file systems, network stacks, database servers etc.).
It is probably fair to put Raymond's essay into the context of other optimistic late-1990s Internet theories of "crowd wisdom", "smart mobs" etc., that promote a similar cybernetic vision of a self-organizing critical mass that is the magic solution to all problems. Linux and, more recently, Wikipedia show that these theories are not completely off and that networked collaboration can amount to critical mass. But none of these projects are without their own issues (such as conservatism: Linux reimplemented Unix instead of the arguably more advanced and interesting Plan9 or Lisp Machine kernel architectures because Unix kernel architecture is the textbook knowledge of every computer science student; Wikipedia nowadays insists, in its angst-ridden compliance to culturally conservative Wikipedia-bashing, on print publication references for everything that is claimed in a Wikipedia article), and "open collaboration" is not a magic bullet.
Mail Art may again serve as a good example, because it was so obsessed with egalitarianism that participation implied to never reject other people's project contributions although the phenomenon of "junk mail" was common and deplored even in the 1970s and 80s.
It should be noted, in case you're not familiar yet with Raymond's ultra right-wing libertarian political background, that he chose metaphors of the "bazaar" versus the "cathedral" quite on purpose - referring to a free market model versus regulated production.
I believe we need to get art out of its Cathedral ?
It is certainly true that art, inasmuch we speak of the contemporary (visual) art system, is still feudalist in its structure. It is the only of the modern arts whose economy is firmly based on the notion of one material fetish object, with reproduction (unlike in books, music records, films, software) being merely a second-rate, plebeian illustration of the "original". Its sponsors are the modern successors to the old feudal authorities; back then, the church and the courts, nowadays rich people as the new aristocrats and, through its grants and subsidies, the state as the authority that has replaced the church.
-F
-- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl
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