Nicholas Carr, who has a new book coming out soon (“The Big Switch”, which argues for software as a service), has a good article in Booz Allen’s Strategy + Business magazine. The article, “The Ignorance of Crowds,” does a good job of looking at where we are with open source software development ten years after Eric Raymond first published “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”

Carr argues that it’s not one or the other but a combination of both; good open source projects are like cathedrals in that they have a small group of leaders but the bazaar gives them advantages in certain areas, especially bug fixes.

He extends the analogy to one of his pet peeves, Wikipedia, which is an ultimate example of a bazaar, since there’s hardly any central authority at all, at least up until recently. I’m a much bigger fan of Wikipedia than Carr is, and I think his reaction partly reflects his editorial background; he was an editor at the Harvard Business Review and I would bet that he takes affront at the idea of a publication without editors.

But that aside, “The Ignorance of Crowds” is a recommended read.

I thought that Sun might announce something like Ubuntu on Solaris this week at the JavaOne conference, but it didn’t turn out that way. Still, “Project Indiana,” led by Ian Murdock, seems like it’s headed in that direction. Tom DiNaro pointed me at a ZDNet article from /. that discusses the possibility.

The basic idea here would be to graft the Debian/Ubuntu userland apps onto the Solaris rootstock, giving Sun the advantages of both: broad developer familiarity and ISV adoption from Linux and the stability (and familiarity on the infrastructure side) of Solaris. Murdock is quoted in the article as saying that he wants to make Solaris a better Linux than Linux.

[Later: the emphasis at the show seems to have been on Sun’s RIA entrant, JavaFX. More here.]

From Gary Ardito, an eWeek article with some details on GPLv3. The latest draft is going to be released tomorrow but the final version won’t come out until the end late summer, “at the earliest.”