> Big companies will often tithe to these megachurches. Some churches are bigger than others. The Linux Foundation makes hundreds of millions of dollars. Smaller foundations like the Python Software Foundation have to make do with only a few million.
This hides essential detail that would seem to very much weaken the argument. You have the Linux Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation that "make hundreds of millions of dollars", and then everyone else is orders of magnitude smaller. Python might be in third place, for all I know (or maybe it's Apache).
> It shows how most open source projects aren’t some giant megachurch like group. These projects are one person.
> It’s easy to assume everyone else is also a megachurch member, even if they are not. The church members are pretty noisy and get a lot of attention.
I suspect most of those random bazaar vendors would like to have a respectable church-sized building. Or at least a proper stall.
> If you look at modern day open source, it sometimes feels like the megachurch open source is better because they have a nice parking lot, give out donation receipts, and it doesn’t smell like kabobs.
Well, no; it has more to do with the sense that outsiders are taking the bazaar seriously.
It was a bad essay at the time and I don't think you can make a good essay by trying to build off it. Adding "megachurch" to the already strained metaphor didn't improve it.
As you point out in your linked comment, the original essay captured the zeitgeist of the time. It also influenced and inspired many people. From that perspective, it's hard for me to agree that it was bad. However, I don't think the content was original at the time (perhaps that's what you mean by bad?) - in the sense that ESR wasn't out ahead of people blazing some new trail and it also didn't hold up very well factually.
Yeah, it's worth remembering that at the time a compiler cost $10k+, an OS $1000s/year - you couldn't work on OS or compiler work unless you worked for a big hardware company - a whole lot of interesting work was locked away from most programmers
Wasn’t Cathedral and the Bazaar originally published in 1999? Who was paying thousands of dollars a year for an OS in 199? And I think GCC was already widespread by then, no?
I didn’t start programming until a few years later, but for sure by 2002, it seemed to me a given that compilers were free. It was my impression that stuff like Borland was niche and that serious stuff like Java and C were free.
Not saying you are wrong, just your comment surprised me. Maybe I have a revisionist memory or maybe those intervening 3 years were quite transformational in the industry.
The firm I was at in 1997 was shipping commercial software with GCC. There were expensive compilers, but you weren't required to use them. For Windows builds, I think we were Borland C++, which was hundreds of dollars. Sun had a pretty expensive compiler for Solaris that I remember using for hunting down memory leaks.
I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k.
Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.
By 2002 I was at Arbor Networks, shipping security software to tier-1 ISPs, and if we'd shipped it on a commercial Unix (let alone Windows) people would have looked at us like we had 2 heads. The writing was on the wall by end of the first dot com boom.
Apple was giving away a C compiler by 1999 afaik, GCC was well established (but going through the egcs drama?). Visual Studio/Visual C++ didn't get a free version until 2005 though.
But yeah imo you're closer to right than not, though Microsoft licenses were still fairly expensive.
Yes, that is the context in which I first read it (likely around 1999 when it appeared on slashdot), as a senior in high school with no access to the tools used by most professional programmers at the time.
Yes, I'm speaking about my experience as I remember it - not what was objectively possible for someone with the right resources and knowledge at the time :)
It was certainly influential. It's just bad on its own merits.
I guess it depends on what you think the goal of the essay was. I always felt like the primary goal was to inspire people and a lot of the software engineering parts were more framing. To me it reads as a manifesto disguised as a software engineering essay.
If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.
> (1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents).
There’s nothing I’m seeing in the text as it is written that suggests this to be the case. There are just a lot of comments I see that amount to: “I don’t like this,” which can be an interesting signal by itself but not if users refuse to elaborate on it, which is what I (erroneously) thought was happening here.
> You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.
I did miss it, sorry. I clicked through and didn’t notice that the top comment was yours. I assumed you were just linking to a past discussion.
I’m sure you already know this, but on the off chance you don’t, you can click on a comment’s timestamp to get a permalink to the specific comment, like this:
You're completely wrong. The fact that people are still talking about it today proves it has some kind of worth. The essay was great.
People are still talking about a flat Earth and creationism. Given 8 billion people, there are enough available braincells to keep even the stupidest idea floating around in the memesphere.
People are still talking about null pointers: that doesn't mean they were ever a good idea.
That's just how the hardware works. Don't like it? Make your own CPU.
I know you're replying to a brand new (likely troll) account, but I'm also very confused by this and would be curious to learn if there's any truth to it. I personally don't really see what a Von Neumann machine has to do with null pointers (or how an implication would go either way), but maybe I'm missing something.
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While it's narrowly true that CPU instruction sets generally don't have a null-pointer concept, I'm not sure how important that is: the null pointer seems to have been (I don't know enough to be sure) a well-established idiom in assembly programming which carried across naturally to BCPL and C. (In much the same way that record types were, apparently, a common assembly idiom long before they became particularly normal to have in HLLs.) Programmers like being able to null out a pointer field, 0 is an obvious "joker" value, and jump-if-0 instructions tend to be convenient and fast. Whether or not you'd want to say it's "how the hardware works" it does seem to have a certain character of inevitability. Even if the Bell Research guys had disapproved of the idiom they would likely have had difficulty keeping it out of other people's C programs once C became popular. The Hoare ALGOL W thing seems to be more relevant to null pointers in Java and the like.
> No, the CPU doesn't have a special pointer value which is designated invalid
Sort of right, sort of wrong.
From my understanding: older, simpler, architectures treat memory location zero as a normal memory address. On x86 and x64, the OS can configure the MMU to treat certain pages as invalid. Many years ago, I ran across a reference to Sparcs treating accesses to memory location zero as invalid. In other words, it depends upon which architecture you're dealing with.
mov rax, qword ptr [0]There are lots of proven bad ideas still being bandies about today, and it does not prove they are anything but enduringly worthless.
> History will probably remember him as LTT, “Linus The Torvalds”
This is trolling right?
There are a lot of tangential, one-liner, throwaway jokes in this article.
Yes, everyone knows LTT is Linus Tech Tips!
> This is trolling right?
Yes, and well done as well. Unlike the other two unmentionables, Linus very much worthy of remembrance. Sure he was extra grumpy for a long time but that's about the only bad thing you can say about the man.
I always interpreted cathedral vs bazaar as being about the architecture of large things. Do you build to a master plan? Or does everyone do whatever they want? (Within some kind of framework, of course.) Like the cathedral of the Java SDKs vs the flea market of NPM.
This author seems to have some kind of attitude about organization in general—anything with people and process, that happens to exist around some project, that might require at least a small commitment to be a part of. Like complaining that a flea market has a form to sign.
The ability for people to functionally collaborate, with some kind of structure, is the key thing that enables building large things together.
The post referred to the Sovereign Tech Agency (https://www.sovereign.tech). The problem that the Sovereign Tech Agency is trying to solve seems to be a hard one.
OpenPrinting is listed as a funded project:
https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/openprinting
yet 7 days ago someone who works on OpenPrinting was here and stated:
"The whole printing stack is supported by 4 people, 2 of whom are doing that since the inception of CUPS in 1999. Scanning is maintained by a single person."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579361
Isn't this the situation the Sovereign Tech Agency is trying to avoid?
idk, without the sovereign tech agency it would be fewer people, or they would have less time to work on the project. You can't expect the German government to completely fill any need for resources in open source software.
Yikes :-(
This makes me wonder - is there some platform on which people who maintain important (or arguably-important) facilities can post Wanted ads for volunteer co-maintainers?
I realize that the number of people who would actually be crazy enough to browse that platform and answer such ads is pretty small... but - it may be noticeably above Zero.
I like the idea that we moved from cathedrals to megachurches because it explains why everything feels so corporate now. It is easy to forget that the messy bazaar is still underneath all the shiny tools we use.
Large endeavours require some level of “megachurchness”. Linux back then was tiny in comparison with what it is today. So was Python. Nowadays we have much larger projects that encompass a much larger space than we had in the 1990s. You can’t make things consistent at these sizes without some governance in place.
There are still a lot of space for projects without much structure- if you have NSA codenames that aren’t public yet (and you are not subject to US laws) you can contribute with the nsaname tool and have cool names for your servers and containers. If you want to help adding glyphs to my 3278 font, you can. You can do that to millions of small projects that are small enough to not require much structure.
It's a great phrase which explains how a company like Apple can take good ideas, implement the parts they like, and not give back.
The Cathedral metaphor doesn't make any sense since the point of the Cathedral is simultaneously to revere God and to be able to take in as many "unwashed masses" as possible. Only by self-exclusion (explicit external irreverence/scandal) can you be excluded.
The metaphor does not refer to the finished building but to the building process
It works for me. Cathedral is analogous to free software being a religion. It is a theocratic worldview that has a zealous following that must apply the rituals of old. Bazaar is the marketplace. It is supposed to be a efficient market metaphor for software being transactional and not relational.
Is this a perfect metaphor? I think its a rigid way of looking at software on either side. I think it is more grey. I like the merits of both sides.
That is not what Eric S. Raymond (esr) was describing.
GNUnix was developed using the Cathedral-style, Linux was developed using the bazaar-style. How Linux development was coordinated was thought to be impossible for something that had to be as solid as an operating system. The essay is a deep dive, exploring the conditions that the Linux project needed to ship an OS.
But ESR believed in right wing, libertarian adjacent politics. He's advocating for deregulated, free market ideas in the form of criticizing GNU. In doing this, he was seeking out the preferred metaphor and working backwards, rather than describing what is.
The author links to another article of theirs called "Open Source is Bigger Than You Can Imagine," which hinges on the size of the npm registry. npm says "open source" on their landing page, and has an "npm Open Source" section of their policies, which places no restrictions on how you license your npm package (save for a special license to them).
This does seem very bazaar to me, but this would all be deemed Not Open Source by the [cathedral/megachurch?] community, correct? Do people take issue with npm using the term open source?
The article says "GNU's not Linux". No, it's "GNU's not Unix".
You can't correct humour.
When something is obviously wrong, perhaps learn to ask yourself if it's trying to be funny. Is dead Python funny?
It's so confidently written too, lol. Like. Think about what an acronym is and if it could possibly stand for something with an L...
If we're working with those metaphors, I think it's useful to read up on how actual, real-life bazaars are operating.
In particular:
> A bazaar or souk is a marketplace consisting of multiple small stalls or shops [...] They are traditionally located in vaulted or covered streets that have doors on each end and served as a city's central marketplace.
> Merchants specialized in each trade were also organized into guilds, which provided support to merchants but also to clients. The exact details of the organizations varied from region to region. Each guild had rules that members were expected to follow, but they were loose enough to allow for competition. Guilds also fulfilled some functions similar to trade unions and were able to negotiate with the government on behalf of merchants or represent their interests when needed.
> Historically, in Islamic cities, the muḥtasib was the official in charge of regulating and policing the bazaar and other aspects of urban life. They monitored things such as weights and measures, pricing, cleanliness, noise, and traffic circulation, as well as being responsible for other issues of public morality. They also investigated complaints about cheating or the quality of goods.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazaar )
So not quite the anarchocapitalist, self-organizing utopia that tech people seem to imagine there - in fact, they have a lot of organization, both between merchants as well as on the bazaar as a whole.
Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.
In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.
With one difference: At least the administrators of real bazaars were public officials with a mandate to keep the market fair - and there was organization among the vendors in form of guilds. With digital marketplaces, the markets themselves are private assets and the administrators are blatantly self-interested. And there doesn't seem to be any kind if higher-order organization across different open source projects, everyone is fighting on their own.
So maybe it would do the open source community good to become more like an actual bazaar.
>Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.
>In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.
Id put it that this is incorrect insofar - as the bazaar was/is a public commons with a dual regulatory environment city(state) and the guilds , which would enforce/regulate as needed.
The digital marketplaces we have would be more anologous to feudal plantations ,where each coder(sharecropper) survives at the whim of their particluar feudal lord , who have total control within that space and the state via lobbying mostly keeps off.Theer are no guild equivalent so when Playstore/Github makes a ruling like the recent hike of dev fees or ci runner. Theres no state or user leverage that can force a reversal other than complaints.
Paradoxically id say they are more megachurch than bazaars.
Guilds are now scorned as communism
Yep and its insane when most devs are actively hostile to unins etc from too much libertarian koolaid when they can see the active backing things like teacher/nurse/police unions provide. They may have some bad ideas , butthe structure and backing kinda gets glossed over.
>Back in the early days there was a person named esr. Don’t look him up, he’s not exactly role model material.
Love it
With that title, I'm clicking and reading all the way through.
I'm writing an article on a similar topic, but it's a critique on a popular development style that imports a huge dependency supply chain (without concern on if they are cathedral, bazaar, or megachurches), and what the benefits of building your thing bottom-up has.
If this sounds interesting to you, hacker news reader, you can leave a comment and I'll reply with a link once it's published.
Kind of offtopic but fun fact I didn't know until recently, the Moldbug definition of Cathedral is based (lol) on the Eric Raymond definition
"Don't look him up, he's not exactly role model material." I don't admire the ethos of putting people in bad boxes.
On the otherhand, I greatly appreciate that we don't pretend everyone is 100% awesome all the time. We shouldn't hold people up as role models that we don't want to emulate, and whatnot.
If we're not pretending everyone is awesome then why permanently deselect certain people as role models?
One of them is legit a saint and the other almost as much. They absolutely are role models, and the way they are talked about now is exactly a lesson in the problem. If more people emulated them, the world would be a much better place.
I can't help but disagree with you 100%. Brilliant technicians aren't automatically role models, and both men have plenty of characteristics that shouldn't be emulated.
Their positive influence on open source is real; that doesn't make them, as people, role models.
Technical abilities are nothing more than big muscles. No one with any depth at all would mean anything like that when they say things like "role model" and "saint", and no one with a lick of sense would assume anyone else would.
If you're talking about Eric S. Raymond here, I'm having trouble not believing that this is just bait. Even in the Linux community, purely on Linux terms he's a problematic and polarizing figure.
I'm annoyed at the arc these discussions invariably take into Raymond's backstory or whatever, because I think CATB fails objectively, on its own merits (or lack thereof) and we don't need to wade into this other stuff. But if we're having the discussion: seems like kind of a wild statement to say he's any reasonable person's role model.
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He very literally said having sex with minors is not sexual assault
>The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.
> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
> I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation.
Reminder that the subject of his writing is a 17 year old girl that was raped by one of Epstein's clients
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Some more of RMS' enlightened thoughts on child rape, a subject he just can't stop himself from writing about ad nauseum. And he insists on calling teenage girls "women" every chance he gets.
But, uh, "a saint" - Brian K White
> I expect that Sudanese law defines “rape” to exclude rape by the husband. That’s comparable to US laws that define “rape” to include voluntary sex with under N years of age (where N varies). Both laws falsify the meaning of “rape”.
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> the article makes it pretty clear that the “children” involved were not children. They were teenagers.
> What about “rape”? Was this really rape? Or did they have sex willingly, and prudes want to call it “rape” to make it sound like an injustice? We can’t tell from the article which one it is.
> Rape means coercing someone to have sex. Precisely because that is a grave and clear wrong, using the same name for something much less grave is a distortion.
---
> The law is an ass again: a woman who invited a teenage boy to have sex (and he did, 4 times) has been sentenced to years in prison for “sexual abuse”.
> He did not live in her household. Evidently he repeatedly made arrangements to suffer this “abuse”. The code word “grooming” probably means, in this case, what we normally call “asking for a date”. While I can only guess the specifics, I speculate that he never complained about this “abuse”, and the relationship was discovered in some other way.
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Kinda getting grossed out so I'm gonna stop
It also instigates people to look at the worst in others. Don't think about pink elephants!
I think enough of us have imperfections that we can appreciate that people who've done wonderful things have also done some very $#!tty things. Someone doesn't need to be a saint to still have a wide, positive influence.
Which wonderful things are you referring to?
I went looking to refresh my memory, and Wikipedia reminded me about the brief window where ESR lent his voice to the Great Slate and helped raise money for progressive campaigns.
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> you may be worried about which box you belong in. ;)
There’s also the risk someone very loud decides to put you in a box you don’t belong in. Eventually you are able to demonstrate it, but, in the meantime, you need to deal with the consequences.
Your post may be insinuating that you put ESR and RMS in such boxes, although you did not actually say that. You might want to clarify that point. (And I say that as someone who has neither upvoted or downvoted you.)
I'll also say that there are enough aspects of our personality and behavior that you might use to justify placing someone in the "bad box" that almost everyone would be in one; and if you were to relax the criteria so that you "average badness" along multiple axes, that comes with its own problems.
I stalled on Which is an acronym for “Gnu’s not Linux” and can't recover from the spin.
It's actually "Gnu's Not Unix", the original article got it wrong too
the article also says the creator of Linux is LTT
It's a joke
It's just harmless trolling
Given the tone of the article I’m sure it was tongue-in-cheek humor and not an error.
It's a joke. I think.
It's excellent. I grinned ear to ear.
> The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral.
I didn't make it past the tldr lol is this some kind of poisoned data for GPT 6?
Not sure if GPT played a role, but for one the editor did a poor job. Very sloppy writing indeed
There's a other group besides these: the secret society, who infiltrate the cathedrals, the megachurches and the bazaar. They are quite cultish, but thankfully the "Data Primacy Lodge" is gaining more initiates than the old guard "Order of Objects"
The latest thing though is that the megachurches send out these evangelist priests who run an inquisition into your amounts tithed. These people then go around trying to co-opt the machinery of the state to redirect money to the megachurches.
“We should tax everyone to fund open source” they say
“Google should pay a percentage of their gross revenue to the Rust Software Foundation” they say
All this is because it’s enough for the bazaar to create but the author has correctly identified that the purpose of the megachurches is to receive tithes.
The Rust megachurch is one of the biggest proponents of this and its adherents are always trying to take our money by force because we won’t give it by will https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048954
Rust delenda est.
Free and open source software provide a ton of value to businesses and consumers. It's right that tax dollars is used to fund what effectively is a public good so that we can all benefit from it even more.
I can see a government requiring itself to provide some funding to open-source projects that it actually makes a lot of use of. But not just open-source in general; no one needs to get funding for some pet project that only that one person cares about and isn't very good anyway: putting some crappy chatGPT-generated code on GitHub should not qualify you for government funding.
There's always a cause and a church. There is an instrument for this: your donations can be tax deductible if you give to a 501c3 that exists for the public benefit. But that's not enough for you guys. Having seen the success of private equity dialysis clinics to redirect Medicare funding, you have decided that you want a piece of this government revenue pie. Enough of this greed.
Rust delenda est.
Alright Cato, but consider that other countries successfully spend their budgets on public goods like infrastructure and the arts.
Don't both, people like them hold society back. I suggest you go out and talk to your physical neighbors about taxing big tech, it has a huge amount of support. The only question is do you want a democratic administration to use said tax revenues to benefit the public or a republican administration to benefit a few private actors.
It's going to happen and I know what side I'd rather be on.
Your country burned 4 million civilians to death in Korea and Vietnam.
I'll leave the monthly rate math to you there.
This is inane. There are other countries besides Germany that finance public works.
Normally I'd say read a history book, but it might be quicker to read a newspaper.
> "...Microsoft. Who we haven’t mentioned in this story, but they hated Linux more than a toddler hates naps."
A lot of FOSS people think this but it's not really true. It was a thorn in the side of MS executives as a competitor, sure, but I never met anyone in the rank and file that could be bothered to hate Linux. More than a few of my colleagues played with Linux at home in the '00s. I cut my teeth on the commercial UNIXes so there wasn't anything interesting about Linux to me until it had caught up with them around 2010 or so.
People mean Microsoft, the corporation, as a policy. Not every employee there literally.
you're trying to rewrite history here, Microsoft used to be a well known linux hater, but linux became popular and they had no choice but to accept it. Remember the "linux is cancer" years...
I was there a couple decades and you weren't.
The devs weren't, but
https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...
Microsoft messaging was very clear at the time
Might want to schedule an appointment for a neurologist because acting like MSFT wasn't anti linux is revisionist history that borders on medical intervention.
I was there, too, and I remember all of the FUD from MS. I remember the Halloween documents, MS funding SCO’s lawsuit, etc. MS saw Linux as a threat, especially in the server space. The goal was to stomp it out, like they did to Netscape.
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The ASF, chartered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity which serves the public good, has a budget a fraction the size of those of orgs chartered as 501(c)(6) nonprofits which serve the common business interests of members.
The PSF is also 501(c)(3) (https://www.python.org/psf/mission/).
A quick check implies Apache is on the order of half the size, though. When I wrote the other comment it was just the only other name that came to mind.
> those random bazaar vendors would like to have a respectable church-sized building.
I believe the analogy breaks down here some. That is, actual bazaar vendors may want this (I suppose), but FOSS maintainers may or may not want an organization to form around them. They may be content with the way things are; or they may just want a co-maintainer.
I think most of them want some measure of success and notoriety. I'd imagine the large majority never even get a PR from a stranger. Long tail, you know.