Problem with bazaar style of development

Ellison Brookes developer in James Goslings thoughts agrees with James Gosling that Sun’s strangle hold of the APIs leads to greater stablilty.

This is true. Too many cooks spoil the broth.
The problems with multitude of open source projects in the bazaar model (thanks to Apache, SourceForge etc.) is that it is messy like a fish market. There is no single direction, no unified vision in the macro view. Many of these are just forks of a project because some developer couldn’t get his pet idea implemented! In the process the same ideas get re-implemented over and over.

Imagine a real fish market. Now multiply that by 1, 000. You have an idea of where this fish-market style of development is heading. It is extremely confusing to the users of the said projects. Choice is good. Too much choice is almost equivalent to no-choice specially in our scenario.
Unlike a fish market it is not easy to choose a product by the looks alone (that’s one advantage you have in a bazaar). When the stakes are high you have to evaluate scrores of products before you can decide and many of them may be just junk.

I was recently looking for Open Source CMS. By the looks of it there are hundreds of available products, each with it own licensing model, own feature list, own way of doing things, own standards. At one point the cost of properly evaluating such choice becomes more than actually developing a custom solution. And in many cases it is today.