Been rethinking my response in an effort to be clearer. > Yes, autoconf was clearly a response to the incompetence of the UNIX industry I think the use of the

Been rethinking my response in an effort to be clearer. > Yes, autoconf was clearly a response to the incompetence of the UNIX industry I think the use of the term "incompetence" misinterprets the forces at play in a way similar to the original article. That interpretation leads to the Cathedral seeming desireable over the Bazaar, when I'd argue if anything the reverse is true. Proprietary vendors have a vested interest in differentiating themselves from their competitors. While they have an interest in making it easy to get software on their platform, they also have an interest in creating barriers to that software moving off their platform. They also have limited interest in changing established behaviours in their platform. The Cathedral model doesn't mean there is one Cathedral. It means that people build software as Cathedrals. This creates additional friction to adopting changes from outside the Cathedral. The Bazaar model does make it easier for fragmentation to take place, but it also makes it easier for established and widely accepted practices to make it back into the code base, and creating additional pressures to be consistent. Autoconf's design is a workaround for the fact that there was no Bazaar for "ld", and still isn't. Like most workarounds, it is uglier than one can imagine. It's whole design was an attempt to exploit the strengths of the Bazaar to work around the horrors reinforced by the Cathedral model. It persists because it remains the best solution of any that was actually built, and it continues to evolve in response to changes to platforms and changes to best practices. One could easily imagine better solutions, but one has yet to materialize. If it would, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see the Bazaar gravitate to it.