5 ms·

> when in reality it is what we have been able to do on our computers since forever You do realise that's been changing right? Slowly of course, there's no sin

by ta1243 1y ago

> when in reality it is what we have been able to do on our computers since forever You do realise that's been changing right? Slowly of course, there's no single villain that James Bond could take down, or that a charistmatic leader could get elected could change. The oil tanker has been moving in that direction for decades. There are legions defending the right to run your own software, but it's a continual war of attrition. The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman. "Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that." https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

gjsman-1000 1y ago
If you want a real blackpill (I think this is the right word), consider the famous Cathedral and the Bazaar. I recently had a realization: I can name Cathedrals, that are 800 years old, and still standing. I can't name a single Bazaar stall more than 50 years old around any Cathedral that's still standing. The Cathedral's builders no doubt bought countless stone and food from the Bazaar, making the Bazaar very useful for building Cathedrals with, but the Bazaar was historically ephemeral. The very title of the essay predicts failure. The very metaphor for the philosophy was broken from the start. Or, in a twisted accidentally correct way, it was the perfect metaphor for how open-source ends up as Cathedral supplies.
- spookie 1y ago
  I fail to see the link, businesses come and go. Their software dies with them.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    Businesses die. Cathedrals don't. IBM is 114 years old. Microsoft is 50. Google is 27. Disney is 101. Nintendo is 136 (they'll outlive Steam and the next nuclear war at this rate). The COBOL running banks is 65 years old. Windows NT architecture is 32. The platforms become infrastructure, too embedded to replace. How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained? Go through GitHub's trending repos from 2015. Most are abandoned. The successes transform - GitLab, Linux, Kubernetes, more Cathedral than Bazaar.
    - mariusor 1y ago
      Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib and GCC, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.
      - gjsman-1000 1y ago
        > Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist. Did BSD defeat Linux? No. Which BSD is even the right one? BSD's biggest success is living on as the foundation of Apple's Cathedral in XNU, and PlayStation's Cathedral in the PS4 and PS5. Did Linux stay a bazaar vendor? No - 90% of code has been corporate contributed since 2004. Less than 3% of the Linux Foundation budget goes towards kernel development. Linux is a Cathedral, by every definition, and only exists today because Cathedrals invest in it for collective benefit. It's a Cathedral, run as a Cathedral joint venture, to be abandoned if a better thing for the investing Cathedrals ever came along. GCC? Being clobbered by Clang. Less relevant every year. Same with GNU coreutils, slowly getting killed by uutils. Firefox? Firefox only still exists because a Cathedral called Google funds it. LibreOffice, Apache, PHP, Blender? Professional foundations that get very picky about who is allowed to contribute what. They aren't amateurs and they all depend on Cathedral funding. Blender only got good when it started collecting checks from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Adobe. Blender is a Cathedral funded by Cathedrals.
        mariusor 1y ago
- nerdsniper 1y ago
  There are definitely bazaars which have a very old history. Being that the word "bazaar" has middle-eastern origins it feels appropriate to highlight middle eastern bazaars. Al-Madina Souq in Aleppo is one such bazaar with quite a few shops/stalls/"souqs" dating back to the 1300's or 1400's, such as Khan al-Qadi (est. 1450). Khan el-Khalili in Cairo has its economic marketplace origins rooted in the 1100's-1300's.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    Name a single bazaar vendor that's still going more than 50 years in any of them. The bazaar as an institution remains, as it does today, but there's no permanence with a bazaar, just as open-source will never have a permanent victory without becoming a cathedral. Bazaars persist through constant replacement, churn, not victory. Windows NT will be with us longer than systemd and flatpak.
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      Cathedrals change organizations too. You can't compare the longevity of a physical edifice (a cathedral) to an individual or organization (a bazaar vendor). They are different classes of things.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
      Windows NT is younger than Unix. I'd say the smart money is on the Unix-derived line of operating systems outliving Windows NT by a considerable amount. However ... the domain of operating systems is subject to weird constraints, and so it's not really appropriate to make some of the observations one might make in other domains. Nevertheless, I thought the point was that we want things to improve via replacement (a "bazaar" model), rather than stand for all time. We don't actually want technology "cathedrals" at all, even if we do appreciate architectural ones.
      - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
        > "I'd say the smart money is on the Unix-derived line of operating systems outliving Windows NT by a considerable amount." Are you referring to the *BSDs? Linux isn't Unix derived. It's a re-implementation with no code traceable back to the original Unix or any of its descendants. Aside from that, Windows has a revenue stream behind it that looks to continue indefinitely paying for its development and Linux has...? The half-digested carcass of Red Hat within IBM? Canonical?
- api 1y ago
  The title also correctly describes the relationship between FOSS and cloud SaaS. FOSS is the bone yard and parts catalog that devs go to when building closed platforms to lock in users. It largely exists today to be free labor for SaaS and training data for AI. I'm not there yet, but I am perilously close to tipping over into believing that making open source software today is actually doing harm by giving more free labor to an exploitative ecosystem. Instead you should charge for your software and try to build an ecosystem where the customer is the customer and not the product. I stress today because this was not true pre-SaaS or pre-mobile. FOSS was indeed liberating in the PC and early web eras.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
  - iamnothere 1y ago
    Not to mention the large number of ancient marketplaces that still exist (in active use) all over the world, some of which are UNESCO world heritage sites. This type of informal market likely outnumbers cathedrals, especially if you count the ones that evolved into tourist markets, high streets, malls, and central business districts.
api 1y ago
> The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman. I've been in tech and startup culture for over a thousand programmer-years (25-30 normal years). It wasn't dot-com or the crash. It was mobile. The mobile ecosystem has always been user-hostile and built around the exploitation of the customer rather than serving the customer. When the huge mobile wave hit (remember "mobile is the future" being repeated the way political pundits repeat talking points?) the entire industry was bent in that direction. I'm not sure why this is. It could have been designed and planned, or it could have evolved out of the fact that mobile devices were initially forced to be locked down by cell carriers. I remember how hard it was for Blackberry and Apple to get cell carriers to allow any kind of custom software on a user device. They were desperately terrified of being commoditized the way the Internet has commoditized telcos and cable companies. Maybe the ecosystem, by being forced to start out in a locked-down way, evolved to embrace it. This is known as path-dependence in evolution. Edit: another factor, I think, is that the Internet had no built in payment system. As a result there was a real scramble to find a way to make it work as a business. I've come to believe that if a business doesn't bake in a viable and honest business model from day zero, it will eventually be forced to adopt a sketchy one. All the companies that have most aggressively followed the "build a giant user base, then monetize" formula have turned to total shit.
- btown 1y ago
  Ironically, to take it full circle, I think that the thing that led to mobile being so user-hostile was the lack of sideloading of apps. I remember sites on the early web like Hampster Dance, where monetization happened as an afterthought. But if you have to pay $99 annually and jump through hoops just to get your software even testable on the devices of a large number of consenting users, the vast majority of software is going to be developed by people who seek an ROI on that $99 investment - which wasn't cheap then and isn't cheap now. Hampster Dance doesn't and wouldn't exist as an app, because Hampster Dance isn't made as a business opportunity. Similarly, outside of a few bright lights like CocoaPods, you don't get an open-source ecosystem for iOS that celebrates people making applications for fun. And Apple doesn't want hobbyist apps on its store, because Apple makes more money when every tap has a chance of being monetized. Killing Flash, too, was part of this strategy. Apple certainly could have said "developers developers developers" and made its SDK free. But it realized it had an opportunity to change the culture of software in a way where it could profit from having the culture self-select for user-hostility, and it absolutely took that opportunity. It's not a bad place, the environment we live in. But IMO, if Apple had just made a principled decision years ago to democratize development on its platforms, and embraced this utopian vision of "anyone can become a programmer"... it could have been a much brighter world.
wkat4242 1y ago
Yeah in the name of "security". Unfortunately it also means giving the key to the Kingdom to a company like Microsoft or Google which are definitely adversaries in my book. Keeping them in check was still possible with full system access. Even Apple I don't trust. They're always shouting about privacy but they define it purely as privacy from third parties, not themselves. And they were the first to come up with a plan where your phone would spy on you 24/7.

by ta1243 1y ago

gjsman-1000 1y ago

If you want a real blackpill (I think this is the right word), consider the famous Cathedral and the Bazaar. I recently had a realization: I can name Cathedrals, that are 800 years old, and still standing. I can't name a single Bazaar stall more than 50 years old around any Cathedral that's still standing. The Cathedral's builders no doubt bought countless stone and food from the Bazaar, making the Bazaar very useful for building Cathedrals with, but the Bazaar was historically ephemeral. The very title of the essay predicts failure. The very metaphor for the philosophy was broken from the start. Or, in a twisted accidentally correct way, it was the perfect metaphor for how open-source ends up as Cathedral supplies.

spookie 1y ago
I fail to see the link, businesses come and go. Their software dies with them.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Businesses die. Cathedrals don't. IBM is 114 years old. Microsoft is 50. Google is 27. Disney is 101. Nintendo is 136 (they'll outlive Steam and the next nuclear war at this rate). The COBOL running banks is 65 years old. Windows NT architecture is 32. The platforms become infrastructure, too embedded to replace. How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained? Go through GitHub's trending repos from 2015. Most are abandoned. The successes transform - GitLab, Linux, Kubernetes, more Cathedral than Bazaar.
  - mariusor 1y ago
    Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib and GCC, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.
    - gjsman-1000 1y ago
      > Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist. Did BSD defeat Linux? No. Which BSD is even the right one? BSD's biggest success is living on as the foundation of Apple's Cathedral in XNU, and PlayStation's Cathedral in the PS4 and PS5. Did Linux stay a bazaar vendor? No - 90% of code has been corporate contributed since 2004. Less than 3% of the Linux Foundation budget goes towards kernel development. Linux is a Cathedral, by every definition, and only exists today because Cathedrals invest in it for collective benefit. It's a Cathedral, run as a Cathedral joint venture, to be abandoned if a better thing for the investing Cathedrals ever came along. GCC? Being clobbered by Clang. Less relevant every year. Same with GNU coreutils, slowly getting killed by uutils. Firefox? Firefox only still exists because a Cathedral called Google funds it. LibreOffice, Apache, PHP, Blender? Professional foundations that get very picky about who is allowed to contribute what. They aren't amateurs and they all depend on Cathedral funding. Blender only got good when it started collecting checks from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Adobe. Blender is a Cathedral funded by Cathedrals.
      - mariusor 1y ago
nerdsniper 1y ago
There are definitely bazaars which have a very old history. Being that the word "bazaar" has middle-eastern origins it feels appropriate to highlight middle eastern bazaars. Al-Madina Souq in Aleppo is one such bazaar with quite a few shops/stalls/"souqs" dating back to the 1300's or 1400's, such as Khan al-Qadi (est. 1450). Khan el-Khalili in Cairo has its economic marketplace origins rooted in the 1100's-1300's.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Name a single bazaar vendor that's still going more than 50 years in any of them. The bazaar as an institution remains, as it does today, but there's no permanence with a bazaar, just as open-source will never have a permanent victory without becoming a cathedral. Bazaars persist through constant replacement, churn, not victory. Windows NT will be with us longer than systemd and flatpak.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Cathedrals change organizations too. You can't compare the longevity of a physical edifice (a cathedral) to an individual or organization (a bazaar vendor). They are different classes of things.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
    Windows NT is younger than Unix. I'd say the smart money is on the Unix-derived line of operating systems outliving Windows NT by a considerable amount. However ... the domain of operating systems is subject to weird constraints, and so it's not really appropriate to make some of the observations one might make in other domains. Nevertheless, I thought the point was that we want things to improve via replacement (a "bazaar" model), rather than stand for all time. We don't actually want technology "cathedrals" at all, even if we do appreciate architectural ones.
    - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
      > "I'd say the smart money is on the Unix-derived line of operating systems outliving Windows NT by a considerable amount." Are you referring to the *BSDs? Linux isn't Unix derived. It's a re-implementation with no code traceable back to the original Unix or any of its descendants. Aside from that, Windows has a revenue stream behind it that looks to continue indefinitely paying for its development and Linux has...? The half-digested carcass of Red Hat within IBM? Canonical?
api 1y ago
The title also correctly describes the relationship between FOSS and cloud SaaS. FOSS is the bone yard and parts catalog that devs go to when building closed platforms to lock in users. It largely exists today to be free labor for SaaS and training data for AI. I'm not there yet, but I am perilously close to tipping over into believing that making open source software today is actually doing harm by giving more free labor to an exploitative ecosystem. Instead you should charge for your software and try to build an ecosystem where the customer is the customer and not the product. I stress today because this was not true pre-SaaS or pre-mobile. FOSS was indeed liberating in the PC and early web eras.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
- iamnothere 1y ago
  Not to mention the large number of ancient marketplaces that still exist (in active use) all over the world, some of which are UNESCO world heritage sites. This type of informal market likely outnumbers cathedrals, especially if you count the ones that evolved into tourist markets, high streets, malls, and central business districts.

api 1y ago

> The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman. I've been in tech and startup culture for over a thousand programmer-years (25-30 normal years). It wasn't dot-com or the crash. It was mobile. The mobile ecosystem has always been user-hostile and built around the exploitation of the customer rather than serving the customer. When the huge mobile wave hit (remember "mobile is the future" being repeated the way political pundits repeat talking points?) the entire industry was bent in that direction. I'm not sure why this is. It could have been designed and planned, or it could have evolved out of the fact that mobile devices were initially forced to be locked down by cell carriers. I remember how hard it was for Blackberry and Apple to get cell carriers to allow any kind of custom software on a user device. They were desperately terrified of being commoditized the way the Internet has commoditized telcos and cable companies. Maybe the ecosystem, by being forced to start out in a locked-down way, evolved to embrace it. This is known as path-dependence in evolution. Edit: another factor, I think, is that the Internet had no built in payment system. As a result there was a real scramble to find a way to make it work as a business. I've come to believe that if a business doesn't bake in a viable and honest business model from day zero, it will eventually be forced to adopt a sketchy one. All the companies that have most aggressively followed the "build a giant user base, then monetize" formula have turned to total shit.

btown 1y ago
Ironically, to take it full circle, I think that the thing that led to mobile being so user-hostile was the lack of sideloading of apps. I remember sites on the early web like Hampster Dance, where monetization happened as an afterthought. But if you have to pay $99 annually and jump through hoops just to get your software even testable on the devices of a large number of consenting users, the vast majority of software is going to be developed by people who seek an ROI on that $99 investment - which wasn't cheap then and isn't cheap now. Hampster Dance doesn't and wouldn't exist as an app, because Hampster Dance isn't made as a business opportunity. Similarly, outside of a few bright lights like CocoaPods, you don't get an open-source ecosystem for iOS that celebrates people making applications for fun. And Apple doesn't want hobbyist apps on its store, because Apple makes more money when every tap has a chance of being monetized. Killing Flash, too, was part of this strategy. Apple certainly could have said "developers developers developers" and made its SDK free. But it realized it had an opportunity to change the culture of software in a way where it could profit from having the culture self-select for user-hostility, and it absolutely took that opportunity. It's not a bad place, the environment we live in. But IMO, if Apple had just made a principled decision years ago to democratize development on its platforms, and embraced this utopian vision of "anyone can become a programmer"... it could have been a much brighter world.

wkat4242 1y ago

Yeah in the name of "security". Unfortunately it also means giving the key to the Kingdom to a company like Microsoft or Google which are definitely adversaries in my book. Keeping them in check was still possible with full system access. Even Apple I don't trust. They're always shouting about privacy but they define it purely as privacy from third parties, not themselves. And they were the first to come up with a plan where your phone would spy on you 24/7.