The Cathedral VS. the Bazaar in the Modern Age

Over break, we our class was tasked with reading “The Cathedral and The Bazaar,” which was effectively the first notable academic work to closely inspect the core differences between software characterized by closed-source development with slow, orchestrated releases (cathedral,)and software that was alternatively open source with constant changes always flowing in from the decentralized user base (bazaar.)

Most of the general philosophy brought forth in the work holds up today, if not more than ever, especially because of the evolution of one sub-field of technology: AI. With AI assisted tooling for developers, the barrier of entry for developer contribution to the “bazaars” has massively decreased, but it also means that people with expertise are more crucial than ever with some of the dangerously misunderstood changes being submitted to a repository. There is more inclination to lean towards “cathedral” style software models in the modern day as a result of this inherent risk from careless AI use, and we have even seen some “bazaar” style models recently take action to make the contribution process more scrutinized. Even with all of this change, the philosophies covered in the paper still hold.

Keycloak Progress

Progress on our project has been steady. Ben and Albert have made a pull request for their issue, and me and Jerry have begun work on our multi-level feature, also going as far as to reach out to the developers communication channel in order to get advice on a design decision. Albert has also started work on an issue I previously reported. We are looking forward to seeing some of our changes get merged soon.

Other group progress

In terms of the work other groups have been doing, it seems to be quite similar to some of the things we have achieved with a large bulk of changes being documentation based, but there were actually a good portion of bugs & features that were developed, and in the cases of some groups, already merged which is cool to me. Most people seem to be on a similar page with communication though, where it varies greatly on a case to case basis, and usually takes a duration of time veering towards the longer end, so I am put at ease with this and as a result have been having a better time being patient with maintainer responses.