bazaar

Bazaars are generally found in areas with a weak or unstable currency, and so work on a bartering system in which the customer can haggle with the seller for an agreeable price or trade.

The stereotypical bazaar is loud, chaotic, dusty, filled with a variety of shabby goods, crooked merchants, beggars and other seedy characters.

bazaar n.,adj.

In 1997, after meditating on the success of Linux for three years, the Jargon File's own editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture and development models titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The main argument of the paper was that Brooks's Law is not the whole story; given the right social machinery, debugging can be efficiently parallelized across large numbers of programmers. The title metaphor caught on (see also cathedral), and the style of development typical in the Linux community is now often referred to as the bazaar mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early and often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer reviewers. After 1998, the evident success of this way of doing things became one of the strongest arguments for open source.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

Ba*zaar", Ba*zar" (?), n. [Per. bazar market.]

1.

In the East, an exchange, marketplace, or assemblage of shops where goods are exposed for sale.

2.

A spacious hall or suite of rooms for the sale of goods, as at a fair.

3.

A fair for the sale of fancy wares, toys, etc., commonly for a charitable objects.

Macaulay.

© Webster 1913.