Commenters here I think are missing what’s most interesting about this essay - it’s a sort of paean to an age we’ve now forgotten, an age that had ended in 2012

Commenters here I think are missing what’s most interesting about this essay - it’s a sort of paean to an age we’ve now forgotten, an age that had ended in 2012, written by a high priest (published in the ACM!) Poul Henning-Kamp has been around long enough to see the end of his system and the rise of what Raymond talked about; high priests like Henning-Kamp just don’t matter as much as they used to, compared to the insane productivity of the entire world pumping out stuff whenever and however they want, gluing together whatever they need. There is a lot of shit being made, sold and given away in the Bazaar, but there are a lot of gems. A tech startup cost millions of dollars to start in say, 2008, the height of the dotcom one boom. For reference, discount hosting providers charged on the order of $30,000 a month for a single Sun server to serve your website. Today, a solid startup can glue together hundreds or thousands of open source libraries and launch product for free. Even if you ignore free time from the AWSes of the world, many a startup can structure their infra around serverless functions and be paying in the 10s of dollars a month. That’s the power of the bazaar, or whatever system we have now, which is more complex than Raymond described. I think the vast majority of users of this site do not want to return to a world where releasing products takes someone of Henning-Kamp’s intelligence and skill - there just aren’t that many of him in the world, and we would have far fewer awesome things in that world.