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The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
- rektide 3y agoStill I think incredibly useful frames for interpetting the world. Society so visibly can see & understand Cathedral entities. And we still are so weak at grokking the rhiziomatic Bazaar assemblages that happen.
- jonstewart 3y agoThe frame largely already existed, though, even in software, e.g., "Worse is Better" (https://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html https://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html).
- rektide 3y agoWorse is better is a discussion on system design. Both parties represented in worse better are implicitly cathedrals: both are singular actors, both with the same value system even (Simple, Correct, Consistent, Complete). None of this embodies the Bazaar to me. The spirit of diversity, chance, chaos, & above all the pluralism: the ability to get Perl style post-modern in approaches, is largely absent from the WIB discussion. The Bazaar is multisystem, multi-agent, in a way that most people building software don't tangle with. It's fundamentally different if you can encompass much more than yourself, than any one effort. The Cathedral & The Bazaar is a book that should make these kinds of distinctions in thinking abundantly apparent. Few of us can ever really experience or witness the Bazaar. It's too vast. The book gives us an impressive tale, where we can begin to see wide exploration & reasoning occuring far beyond the scales that even the biggest boldest widest orgs on the planet can see.
- jonstewart 3y agoWell, very clearly "The Right Thing" (i.e., MIT school) is the approach used when building a cathedral and I don't think it's that far of a leap (especially, anyone who could read this essay in 1999 was intimately familiar with the Cold War, in part a struggle of planned economies vs market economies, and there's a bit of The End of History triumphalism here). The cathedral and the bazaar may be a memorable metaphor, but the essential ideas (rationalism vs empiricism) are ancient.
- paulddraper 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoUsers probably flagged your post because on HN a previous thread is only considered a dupe if it got significant attention, and that one didn't. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.) Btw we invited wallflower to repost it (which is part of how we get things into the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), because we noticed that not only did that submission not get attention, the essay really hadn't been discussed much on HN over the years.
- cgh 3y agoThematically related: “The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook”, by Niall Ferguson
- tptacek 3y agoJust taken on its merits, I think a case can be made that this is one of the most overrated pieces of technical writing of the last 25 years. What's true in it isn't interesting ("the importance of having users", "release early release often") and what's interesting isn't true ("Linus's law" being perhaps the most notorious example). Much of the insight is taken directly from Brooks. The whole piece has as its backdrop the development of Fetchmail, which is not a well-regarded piece of software. What's notable about Cathedral is its timing; it did capture the zeitgeist of what was an important moment in the computing field, the moment where we transitioned from 386bsd-style hobby projects to an industry run on free and open source software. But Raymond isn't the reason why any of that happened, and much of his description of that moment is faulty; the rest of it is just a retrospective of the engineering decisions involved in the writing of a midlist mail processing utility (fetchmailrc syntax, password encryption, the now-largely-irrelevant distinctions between MDAs and MTAs). Even the high-level organizing notion of "cathedrals" and "bazaars", which should have been a lay-up, hasn't really proven out.
- ghaff 3y agoThe main criticism (IMO) isn't really the work itself but how it's handed down as wisdom. It wasn't really cathedral==proprietary and bazaar==open source. In fact it was about cathedral vs. bazaar in open source software and that story is more complicated and comes down to "It depends." There are certainly open source projects that have more of a cathedral aspect whether because of benevolent dictator model or, more recently, a strong commercially-oriented foundation. But there are also areas that look more like a bazaar which have some advantages with respect to innovation but can be... messy.
- dang 3y agoRelated (surprisingly little over the years) - others? The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829361 - May 2023 (2 comments) On Management and the Maginot Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314682 - Oct 2022 (27 comments) The Cathedral and the Bazaar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328219 - Feb 2018 (1 comment) The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2000) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198625 - July 2016 (1 comment) Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754279 - May 2016 (57 comments) Revisiting the many eyes theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416597 - Oct 2014 (1 comment) A Second look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222945 - March 2010 (1 comment) The Cathedral and the Bazaar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162376 - April 2008 (2 comments)
- mulmen 3y agoIs there some kind of effect where something is so well known that it doesn’t get brought up? Like a reverse bathtub curve?
- bombcar 3y agodang failed to have hacker news running in 1999 I suspect
- dang 3y agoI think there might be! It was sort of old hat by the time HN came along.
- Tao3300 3y agoReminds me of the challenge of figuring out the rules to the Royal Game of Ur. It was surprisingly widespread and popular in the ancient world. There were sketched game boards and references to it in written sources, but hardly anyone had written down rules for it. It was held to be common knowledge.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nickdothutton 3y agoI feel compelled to mention that even today, the EU cannot grok the bazaar.
- smcin 3y agoCan you cite some specific examples why you say that?
- smcin 3y agoDid you mean the proposed Cyber Resilience Act? https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/12/python_management_eu/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/12/python_management_eu/
- nickdothutton 3y agoExactly this. I should have given an example.
- zokier 3y agoThe ending paragraphs: > Perhaps this is not only the future of open-source software. No closed-source developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem. Very few could afford even to hire the more than 200 (1999: 600, 2000: 800) people who have contributed to fetchmail! > Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software ``hoarding'' is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem. Problematically I don't really see anywhere discussion where that large amount of skilled time originates; the economics of the situation. Even developers need to put food on the table.
- tptacek 3y agoNotice how the argument breaks down. It is the case that the open source model has made Linux difficult to compete with (though that is in significant ways the result of commercial development; still, those corporate contributors were coerced into open source development by Linux's success, and would have done things differently in a VxWorks alternate history). But that same open source model produced Fetchmail. Most startups could produce something comparable to Fetchmail, even if forced to use 1999 tools. The open source model didn't turn Fetchmail into an insurmountably dominant tool in its space; Fetchmail had fallen into irrelevance even before Google Mail made all of these kinds of tools irrelevant.
- chubot 3y agoYeah the fallacy is that most open source comes from independent programmers What has undoubtedly happened since Raymond’s time is that Intel, Google, etc became the biggest Linux contributors Mozilla has been almost entirely funded by search revenue for decades Big pieces of open source like the JVM and MySQL seem to require corporate stewards, for better or worse Microsoft did a 180 on open source, to some acclaim, which I’m still skeptical of So the framing is it a bit wrong now, and modern writing probably needs new terms to make these distinctions clear There is independent open source but it seems clear that most open source is funded by commercial entities
- chrisco255 3y agoI think for me, when I was first learning software development 12 years ago, I had heard about Linux and open source, but I didn't really understand how it operated or organized itself. I had seen Wikipedia appear in the early 00s and understood that distributed groups could develop something better than centralized entities (such as Microsoft's Encarta or Britannica's encyclopedia), but the analogy of a centrally planned cathedral, carefully coordinated, vs the organized chaos of a bazaar, was useful for me in understanding why software development is quite unlike other engineering disciplines, especially once software was augmented with the ability to update itself over the internet. You can build software like a traditional engineering project, with a chief architect and lead engineer drawing up plans along with a team of people that map out all the specs ahead of time. But the internet changed everything. It made distributed coordination possible, and long-running, complex open source projects that could outlive or outgrow their founding team, became achievable.
- tsimionescu 3y agoBut the reality today at least is that that is not how big, successful open source projects get developed. They are very much handled as large engineering projects, with architects and lead engineers for each area or feature at least. You won't get a new feature into the Linux networking stack without discussing and reviewing it with the network maintainers, for example. And ultimately you'll still need Linus' approval if it is a major feature. It's also important to note that some of the major open source projects are currently, in practice, collaborations of multiple large corporations. At least this is clearly how Linux works (the vast majority of contributions are coming from corporate players such as Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc), Clang, Kubernetes. Firefox and the GNU suite of tools are probably the largest exceptions, along with a few big projects developed by a single company with few outside contributions (JVM, ElasticSearch, Grafana, etc).
- microtherion 3y agoNot only are many successful open source projects run as cathedrals, but often it turns out that hunchbacks are in charge of crucial parts of the cathedrals.
- mastermedo 3y agoThe Cathedral and the Bazaar often comes in discussions along with the Song of Sisyphus[0], a story of how Sisyphus software became widely used within Google. The use of it spread over bar drinks, completely organically. And Google had a very hard time deprecating it. [0]: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/a-case-study/9781098114596/ch01.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/a-case-study/9781098114...
- tptacek 3y agoRight. If you want something that has perhaps a more profound and interesting description of the open source model (as Zawinski would put it, the "CADT model"), it's worth going back to Richard Gabriel: https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html Gabriel's essay is cited in Raymond's article. It's interesting to compare them; Raymond claims that Gabriel anticipated much of what his article was going to say, but I think they have markedly different takes about it.
- msla 3y ago"Worse Is Better" is elegiac, but it can also come across as a whine: "Those dumb users can't see Quality, they can only see Done, so they ignore my Beatific Solution in favor of some New Jersey Code that isn't nearly as good as what mine is going to be." Well, in a world where Done is a myth, Quality is a horizon; it's impossible to achieve Quality when the nature of your world is changing around you. The Right Thing is only Right as long as the Thing stays still.
- coldtea 3y agoThat didn't age very well...
- joeman1000 3y agoIt's an ESR post... what more could we expect?
- andyjohnson0 3y agoWhat happened to esr? His blog has been dead for a few years.
- DonHopkins 3y ago[flagged]
- giraffe_lady 3y agoThis seems like an even and accurate description of his current activities I wonder why it's light grey for me.
- emodendroket 3y agoIt has been a while but I feel like the political and racial content is pretty in line with stuff that used to go on his blog; that just didn't use to be his main focus.
- arp242 3y agoAt some point he explained that this isn't racist because he could imagine an alternative universe where black people weren't dumb and violent, and in that universe he'd have 0 problems with black people. Eric S. Raymond has imaginary quantum black friends. One of the most hilariously absurd things I've ever read.
- Findecanor 3y agoJay "Tron Guy" Maynard and Eric S Raymond have been friends in real life for a long time. Not just "a fan".
- tptacek 3y agoProbably tread a little lightly when we're talking about "what happened" with Raymond, since my understanding is that he's dealing with some pretty significant health problems. I won't sugarcoat my opinions of his work, but neither would I wish those kinds of problems on anyone, nor would I want to be seen as taking shots at their inability or reluctance to respond while dealing with them.
- leoc 3y agoThe Wolfram effect https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20071283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20071283 seems nearly as strong as ever on this topic.
- hunter2_ 3y agoThis is very off-topic and for that I apologize, but can anyone shed some light on why so many texts of this era use 2 backticks/graves as a left double quote and 2 apostrophes (neutral single quotes) as a double right quote? I could understand using neutral single quotes all around if the double quote character wasn't available, but why the backticks? I get that they look more out of place with proportional fonts than fixed-width, but even when fixed-width was ubiquitous and even if this usage of glyphs looked symmetrical, it would've deviated from how the code points are defined, right? Or were the definitions so multi-valued (like the "hyphen/minus" character) that this was legitimate?
- joeman1000 3y agoI think this is necessary for quotes in LaTeX. Could also be the same for something horrible that ESR would use, like `troff` or `groff`.
- gerikson 3y agoIt's also a convention in GNU Info.
- tom_ 3y agoSome discussion here: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
- hunter2_ 3y agoBrilliant, thanks. Even a brief mention of hyphen-minus!
- nologic01 3y agoOld articles about open source help show how dynamic the patterns of bazaar like software building and how difficult to grasp new phenomena in their entirety. There are different types of bazaars. We have not seen them all yet. The "invasion" of corporate interests is much discussed, but its just one of many new types of legal entities that get involved: non-profit entities and the public sector. There are two drivers that are persistent and act like heat elements that keep steering the pot of bazaar like behavior: 1) software is important and 2) software that is not closed and proprietary is possible and even necessary. The involvement of the public sector in particular seems still quite nascent. Yet the concept of "digital public goods" is already here (there is even an initiative with that name) and will likely play more important role going forward. The perennial issue with open source is funding, but this reflects some peculiarities of the most decentralized type of bazaar. In other words, while the bazaar has been happening in the town square for a few decades now, it keeps changing and, importantly, it keeps growing.
- apienx 3y agoI did a post-doc in one of the top polymer chemistry department. There, I noticed people tend to share the minimum amount of information. I then left this quote prominently displayed in the hall: "Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets." - Eric S. Raymond
- phkamp 3y agoA counter point: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
- eternityforest 3y agoThe thing I always notice about this is that nearly every piece of software in my life is Cathedral model. A lot of amazing stuff gets invented by the community, but it generally never becomes modern polished software till a Cathedral builder gets their hands on it.