alt Hacker NewsIf we're working with those metaphors, I think it's useful to read up on how actual, real-life bazaars are operating.
In particular:
> A bazaar or souk is a marketplace consisting of multiple small stalls or shops [...] They are traditionally located in vaulted or covered streets that have doors on each end and served as a city's central marketplace.
> Merchants specialized in each trade were also organized into guilds, which provided support to merchants but also to clients. The exact details of the organizations varied from region to region. Each guild had rules that members were expected to follow, but they were loose enough to allow for competition. Guilds also fulfilled some functions similar to trade unions and were able to negotiate with the government on behalf of merchants or represent their interests when needed.
> Historically, in Islamic cities, the muḥtasib was the official in charge of regulating and policing the bazaar and other aspects of urban life. They monitored things such as weights and measures, pricing, cleanliness, noise, and traffic circulation, as well as being responsible for other issues of public morality. They also investigated complaints about cheating or the quality of goods.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazaar )
So not quite the anarchocapitalist, self-organizing utopia that tech people seem to imagine there - in fact, they have a lot of organization, both between merchants as well as on the bazaar as a whole.
Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.
In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.
With one difference: At least the administrators of real bazaars were public officials with a mandate to keep the market fair - and there was organization among the vendors in form of guilds. With digital marketplaces, the markets themselves are private assets and the administrators are blatantly self-interested. And there doesn't seem to be any kind if higher-order organization across different open source projects, everyone is fighting on their own.
So maybe it would do the open source community good to become more like an actual bazaar.
Replies
re anarchocapitalism: it doesn't imply lack of organization, nor how the organazitional structure gets formed.
its essence is a perspective on the legitimate use of force, on what principles should govern the use of force. and your quotes don't discuss any of that in the context of the bazaar prior to your offhand dismissal of the concept.
i.e. we don't know how close the organization and enforcement of the bazaar was to ancap priciples.
if e.g. all the enforcement were that you were simply not allowed to enter the bazaar until you complied, then it's fully compatible.
>Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.
>In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.
Id put it that this is incorrect insofar - as the bazaar was/is a public commons with a dual regulatory environment city(state) and the guilds , which would enforce/regulate as needed.
The digital marketplaces we have would be more anologous to feudal plantations ,where each coder(sharecropper) survives at the whim of their particluar feudal lord , who have total control within that space and the state via lobbying mostly keeps off.Theer are no guild equivalent so when Playstore/Github makes a ruling like the recent hike of dev fees or ci runner. Theres no state or user leverage that can force a reversal other than complaints.
Paradoxically id say they are more megachurch than bazaars.