Innovation Takes a Bazaar and a Cathedral

Over at the Open Source Blog, IBM's Savio Rodriguez discusses a presentation by Spring Source's Rod Johnson at EclipseCON. 

Rod and Savio come to the same conclusion that we at ACT has been discussing for years: Innovation takes a Bazaar and a Cathedral. 

As Savio writes:

Rod challenged the notion that the Bazaar model is the best or only way forward. Rod claimed (near quotes):

"The bazaar model encourages competition in implementation, but may not produce innovation.
....

The cathedral model is more likely to produce innovation. Remember that Eclipse began as a cathedral project from IBM.

....

Now, the combination of the bazaar model and the cathedral model drive innovation to a much higher degree than either would alone."

It is a simple matter of economic incentives and the incentives in the proprietary model enable companies to invest more in revolutionary innovation than the incentives in the Bazaar model.  Of course that doesn't mean that revolutionary software can only come from proprietary models or that all proprietary software is revolutionary.  From a macroeconomic perspective, however, the proprietary model is more likely to get companies like IBM to invest in big innovations. As Rod concludes:  

the combined use of the OSS model and the proprietary software model is the future. I've seen (and lived through) proof that proprietary vendors are learning from OSS vendors. Are OSS vendors doing the same with lessons from proprietary vendors? Or have OSS proponents led OSS vendors to believe that there is nothing to be learned from "the past". I hope not.