Cathedral vs Bazaar in Practice

This week we learned about the cathedral vs bazaar model of development.

The cathedral model is more centralized and controlled, where a small group of developers carefully builds the system. In contrast, the bazaar model is open and collaborative, where anyone can contribute and development happens continuously.

In theory, most open source projects follow the bazaar model. However, from my experience, it is not completely “open.” While anyone can submit a pull request, maintainers still control what gets accepted. This creates a structure that is somewhere between cathedral and bazaar.

My Progress on the Project

Our group is working on pandas, and I was able to make my first contribution. I submitted a documentation pull request, which has already been accepted:

https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/pull/64989

This experience changed my perspective on open source. Before, I thought contributing to large projects like pandas was something very difficult or even unreachable. However, after completing this PR, I realized that contributions can start from small things, such as improving documentation or fixing minor configuration issues.

Sometimes, maintainers may not notice small details, and contributors can help improve those parts. This makes open source feel much more accessible than I initially thought.

Reflection on Other Groups

I was surprised that almost every group has already made one or two pull requests. This shows that contributing to open source is not as “high-level” or exclusive as it seems.

At the same time, many groups reported similar challenges, such as slow PR reviews or difficulty understanding large codebases. This aligns with our experience as well.

Thoughts on Open Source and Incentives

One question I keep thinking about is sustainability. If people contribute to open source, how do they support themselves financially? It seems unrealistic for most contributors to rely entirely on open source work for income.

However, I still strongly support open source. I think collaboration is the only way to build large and meaningful systems. Open source allows many people to contribute together, which would not be possible in a fully closed model.

How AI Changes the Bazaar Model

AI is making open source even more interesting.

On one hand, AI lowers the barrier to contribution. More people can generate code and participate in projects, which strengthens the bazaar model.

On the other hand, this may lead to a large increase in pull requests, many of which may not be deeply thought through. This puts more pressure on maintainers, since reviewing code is time-consuming and mentally demanding.

This made me think about a possible future role: an “AI maintainer.” If AI can help review pull requests, check code quality, and detect potential issues, it could significantly reduce the workload of human maintainers.

Personally, I do not think AI-generated code is a bad thing. The original motivation of open source is that one person cannot build everything alone. AI simply allows more people to participate. However, it also introduces risks, especially when contributors do not fully understand the system structure, which may lead to bugs or inconsistencies.

Looking Forward

In the remaining weeks, I hope our group can:

• make more meaningful contributions beyond documentation
• better understand the pandas codebase
• continue engaging with the open source community

Overall, this experience helped me realize that open source is not only about coding, but also about collaboration, patience, and system-level thinking.