Some claim that, lacking strong leadership, the bazaar can only handle the cloning and improvement of ideas already present at the engineering state of the art, but is unable to push the state of the art. This argument was perhaps most infamously made by the Halloween Documents , two embarrassing internal Microsoft memoranda written about the open-source phenomenon. There are serious errors of fact implied in this argument. Other examples are legion, as a visit to Freshmeat on any given day will quickly prove. This is nonsense.
Insight comes from individuals.
Some will characterize this as a romantic view, a reversion to outmoded lone-inventor stereotypes. Cathedrals and bazaars and other social structures can catch that lightning and refine it, but they cannot make it on demand. To suppose that cathedral-style development could manage this trick but the low entry barriers and process fluidity of the bazaar cannot would be absurd. If what it takes is one person with one good idea, then a social milieu in which one person can rapidly attract the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of others with that good idea is going inevitably to out-innovate any in which the person has to do a political sales job to a hierarchy before he can work on his idea without risk of getting fired. And, indeed, if we look at the history of software innovation by organizations using the cathedral model, we quickly find it is rather rare.