Hoping to bring order and structure to the Bazaar

The Design of Design is one of my favorite books. In "A Generation Lost in the Bazaar" Poul-Henning Kamp is stating "It is a sad irony, indeed, that those who most need to read it may find The Design of Design entirely incomprehensible", where "those" refers to programmers who have "never seen a cathedral" (as in a beautiful architecture). His example of a cathedral is (the original idea of) Unix, whereas BSD is the bazaar.

Needless to say I don't fully agree with the idea of the perfect upfront design for systems of a certain size. But that's not important. Funnily I might be considered one of "those" - yet I like The Design of Design specificly because it talks about building a house and thinking about it iteratively. Furthermore, I am not a big fan of the building architecture metaphor. I don't think a black and white thinking is helpful, most cathedrals might turn out as a tower of Babel and others, like Unix, might be a pretty small shrine with 4200 LoC.

Poul-Henning claims "quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it" which is apparently based on a quote from the book "the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for much of the goodness of the outcome". The question whether democracy/crowd/agile is better suited for certain problems than aristocracy/delphi-method/waterfall will never be solved, there is no true or false in this question. I guess I can agree with Poul-Henning on the responsibility as much as I can agree with Brooks on iterative design and still consider cathedrals harmful. The discussion always reminds me of the "first follower" meme - the key is not to have a central instance sanctioning "old festering hacks" (one comment to the post stated Linux as an example for that - very well done), the key is to avoid these hacks before they happen by allowing communication and embracing change.

My point is: Who said someone needs to be responsible for the whole system? With modern programming techniques programmers can be responsible for smaller parts and bring beauty to them. With modern collaboration techniques we can share thoughts about others' architectures and avoid a mix of, say, Perl and Python. In fact, almost all cathedrals of the middle ages were built iteratively (and even some modern ones). Sometimes visionary architects come up with something like Sydney Opera House and someone else finishes it. Ideas make leaders, not prohibition.