8 ms·

The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar

178 points by todsacerdoti 10mo ago

mkoubaa 9mo ago
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"
sowbug 9mo ago
I stalled on Which is an acronym for “Gnu’s not Linux” and can't recover from the spin.
- tormeh 9mo ago
  It's excellent. I grinned ear to ear.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- k3nsa1 9mo ago
  It's actually "Gnu's Not Unix", the original article got it wrong too
  - karel-3d 9mo ago
    It's a joke. I think.
  - nextaccountic 9mo ago
    It's just harmless trolling
  - jbggs 9mo ago
    the article also says the creator of Linux is LTT It's a joke
  - z3512 9mo ago
    Given the tone of the article I’m sure it was tongue-in-cheek humor and not an error.
- faxmeyourcode 9mo ago
  > 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?
  - pipo234 9mo ago
    Not sure if GPT played a role, but for one the editor did a poor job. Very sloppy writing indeed
- mkesper 9mo ago
  It might be a reference to the GNU HURD: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/documentation.html https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/documentation.html There's also an article about HURD vs Linux by RMS (origin seems to be 1996, last update 2009/2012): https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html
zahlman 9mo ago
> 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.
- rectang 9mo ago
  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.
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    The PSF is also 501(c)(3) (https://www.python.org/psf/mission/ 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.
- einpoklum 9mo ago
  > 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.
xg15 9mo ago
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 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.
- rzerowan 9mo ago
  >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.
jhatemyjob 9mo ago
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
ThrowawayB7 9mo ago
> "...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.
- ronsor 9mo ago
  People mean Microsoft, the corporation, as a policy. Not every employee there literally.
- sunsetSamurai 9mo ago
  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...
  - ThrowawayB7 9mo ago
    I was there a couple decades and you weren't.
    - PygmySurfer 9mo ago
      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.
    - nextaccountic 9mo ago
      The devs weren't, but https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca... Microsoft messaging was very clear at the time
    - 9mo ago
canadaduane 9mo ago
"Don't look him up, he's not exactly role model material." I don't admire the ethos of putting people in bad boxes.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- nilamo 9mo ago
  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.
  - philipallstar 9mo ago
    If we're not pretending everyone is awesome then why permanently deselect certain people as role models?
  - Brian_K_White 9mo ago
    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.
    - wahnfrieden 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Brian_K_White 9mo ago
        There isn't any such "advocacy".
        queenkjuul 9mo ago
        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 --- 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”. --- > 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. --- Kinda getting grossed out so I'm gonna stop
brid 9mo ago
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.
- larrydag 9mo ago
  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.
  - asveikau 9mo ago
    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.
  - jt2190 9mo ago
    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.
- afiori 9mo ago
  The metaphor does not refer to the finished building but to the building process
- yellowapple 9mo ago
  The “unwashed masses” are the end users; both “cathedrals” and “bazaars” welcome all users to partake without demanding an entry fee. The difference between a “cathedral” v. a “bazaar” is whether or not those “unwashed masses” are easily able to become the “staff”; the analogy hinges on the relative difficulty required to join the “clergy” v. become a “merchant”.
jrowen 9mo ago
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?
- yellowapple 9mo ago
  Why would that all be deemed “Not Open Source”?
  - jrowen 9mo ago
    My understanding is that something can only be called Open Source (vs. Source Available) if it uses one of the approved licenses that uphold the GNU Four Freedoms of Software. Which isn't a requirement of npm.
    - yellowapple 9mo ago
      Now I'm curious how many NPM packages use non-OSI/FSF-approved licenses.
dfajgljsldkjag 9mo ago
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.
- rbanffy 9mo ago
  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.
- emchammer 9mo ago
  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.
uncletaco 9mo ago
> History will probably remember him as LTT, “Linus The Torvalds” This is trolling right?
- pstuart 9mo ago
  > 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.
- asveikau 9mo ago
  There are a lot of tangential, one-liner, throwaway jokes in this article.
- stronglikedan 9mo ago
  Yes, everyone knows LTT is Linus Tech Tips!
- yxhuvud 9mo ago
  It is a reference to Torvalds making an appearance on the LTT youtube channel, intentionally getting the LTT meaning wrong.
tptacek 9mo ago
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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35939383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35939383
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- networkadmin 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
    People are still talking about null pointers: that doesn't mean they were ever a good idea.
    - networkadmin 9mo ago
      That's just how the hardware works. Don't like it? Make your own CPU.
      - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
        No, the CPU doesn't have a special pointer value which is designated invalid (except as far as modern address spaces are so large that you cannot possibly map memory to each address without mirroring). In many OSs, e.g. CP/M, address 0 is actually meaningful. The C idiom of cramming sum-type semantics into the nooks and crannies of a return value that ordinarily means something entirely different is an extremely poor one, and null pointers are the poster child: Tony Hoare's billion-dollar mistake. It's absolutely fine to have a packed representation of a sum type "under the hood": this is how Rust implements Option<&T> (where T: Thin), for example. It's also fine to expose the layout of this packed representation to the programmer, as C's union does. But it's a huge footgun to have unchecked casts as the default. If not for this terrible convention, C wouldn't have any unchecked implicit casts: something like f(1 + 0.5) performs a coercion, a far more sensible behaviour. The only reason we're talking about null pointers at all is because they were an influential idea, not because they were a good idea. Likewise with the essay.
renewiltord 9mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048954 Rust delenda est.
- kiba 9mo ago
  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.
  - renewiltord 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Y_Y 9mo ago
      Alright Cato, but consider that other countries successfully spend their budgets on public goods like infrastructure and the arts.
      - renewiltord 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        Y_Y 9mo ago
        Normally I'd say read a history book, but it might be quicker to read a newspaper.
dgreensp 9mo ago
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.
TZubiri 9mo ago
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.
emanueleo 9mo ago
The article says "GNU's not Linux". No, it's "GNU's not Unix".
- robocat 9mo ago
  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?
- singpolyma3 9mo ago
  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...
- Kholin 9mo ago
  To be fair, there is nothing wrong with either of them.
femto 9mo ago
The post referred to the Sovereign Tech Agency (https://www.sovereign.tech 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579361 Isn't this the situation the Sovereign Tech Agency is trying to avoid?
- luplex 9mo ago
  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.
- einpoklum 9mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - marcus_holmes 9mo ago
    Who's going to vet the applicants to ensure that they're not secretly working for bad people, and that as soon as they have sufficient permissions/lack of oversight they'll inject malware into the project and ship it? We're seeing ever-increasing supply chain attacks. All these bazaar projects are vulnerable to that. It's going to take some serious funding to get the kind of oversight we actually need to secure this stuff properly. And the clock's ticking - those maintainers from the 90's are going to retire, and we need to have some way of replacing them
queenkjuul 9mo ago
>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
- bigpeopleareold 9mo ago
  Whoops, looked him up. Growing a big moustache out and changing my political affiliations as I write this.
  - queenkjuul 9mo ago
    I warned you
deadbabe 9mo ago
Cathedral, Megachurch, Bazaar, and now in the age of AI: The Chinese Room.
yxhuvud 9mo ago
If nothing else, the history recap is absolutely brilliant.
utopiah 9mo ago
To the author : "Sovereign Tech Agency. They are funding open source with no strings attached. It’s likely there are other things similar I don’t know about yet (do let me know)." checkout NLNet
zjaffee 9mo ago
One thing that is repeatedly underdiscussed about open source is that every time you have a major open source project become successful, be that anything from Linux to Apache Spark, you have private companies who come in, build something that can very reasonably still be called Linux or Apache Spark, but underneath has tons and tons of extra stuff that they never feed back into the open source community. Hell, I think with the later (since all major cloud providers deploy their own version of spark on their respective data processing cluster services), people don't even know that they aren't in fact using open source software. Hell, eventually you get to a point where companies that choose not to use these third party services eventually just open source their own improvements or abstractions as again separate open source projects that never make it into the upstream project (which are often times heavily influenced by profit making entities). This has been the model for a very long time, going back to at least the likes of redhat. And certainly will be going forward with countless future projects. Maybe there needs to be new models of open source governance, but I have no clue how successful such a thing would even be.
- ekianjo 9mo ago
  > but underneath has tons and tons of extra stuff that they never feed back into the open source community. Very unlikely for GPL2 projects
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    See cloud provider specific distros, or Android Linux kernel. Thing is, when they misbehave, someone has to have the money to bring them to court.
Projectiboga 9mo ago
This essay's main point was to wander thr Bazaar and rummage around the wares on their tables. He suggests to find some places to contribute. Not in a brash self serving way but looking to make things and one's self better.
kazinator 9mo ago
The only flaw in the introduction of the megachurch to the analogy is that cathedrals were large projects built by megachurches.

178 points by todsacerdoti 10mo ago

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"

sowbug 9mo ago

I stalled on Which is an acronym for “Gnu’s not Linux” and can't recover from the spin.

tormeh 9mo ago
It's excellent. I grinned ear to ear.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
k3nsa1 9mo ago
It's actually "Gnu's Not Unix", the original article got it wrong too
- karel-3d 9mo ago
  It's a joke. I think.
- nextaccountic 9mo ago
  It's just harmless trolling
- jbggs 9mo ago
  the article also says the creator of Linux is LTT It's a joke
- z3512 9mo ago
  Given the tone of the article I’m sure it was tongue-in-cheek humor and not an error.
faxmeyourcode 9mo ago
> 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?
- pipo234 9mo ago
  Not sure if GPT played a role, but for one the editor did a poor job. Very sloppy writing indeed
mkesper 9mo ago
It might be a reference to the GNU HURD: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/documentation.html https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/documentation.html There's also an article about HURD vs Linux by RMS (origin seems to be 1996, last update 2009/2012): https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html

zahlman 9mo ago

> 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.

rectang 9mo ago
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.
- zahlman 9mo ago
  The PSF is also 501(c)(3) (https://www.python.org/psf/mission/ 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.
einpoklum 9mo ago
> 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.

xg15 9mo ago

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 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.

rzerowan 9mo ago
>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.

jhatemyjob 9mo ago

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

ThrowawayB7 9mo ago

> "...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.

ronsor 9mo ago
People mean Microsoft, the corporation, as a policy. Not every employee there literally.
sunsetSamurai 9mo ago
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...
- ThrowawayB7 9mo ago
  I was there a couple decades and you weren't.
  - PygmySurfer 9mo ago
    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.
  - nextaccountic 9mo ago
    The devs weren't, but https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca... Microsoft messaging was very clear at the time
  - 9mo ago

canadaduane 9mo ago

"Don't look him up, he's not exactly role model material." I don't admire the ethos of putting people in bad boxes.

deleted 9mo ago
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nilamo 9mo ago
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.
- philipallstar 9mo ago
  If we're not pretending everyone is awesome then why permanently deselect certain people as role models?
- Brian_K_White 9mo ago
  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.
  - wahnfrieden 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Brian_K_White 9mo ago
      There isn't any such "advocacy".
      - queenkjuul 9mo ago
        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 --- 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”. --- > 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. --- Kinda getting grossed out so I'm gonna stop

brid 9mo ago

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.

larrydag 9mo ago
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.
- asveikau 9mo ago
  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.
- jt2190 9mo ago
  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.
afiori 9mo ago
The metaphor does not refer to the finished building but to the building process
yellowapple 9mo ago
The “unwashed masses” are the end users; both “cathedrals” and “bazaars” welcome all users to partake without demanding an entry fee. The difference between a “cathedral” v. a “bazaar” is whether or not those “unwashed masses” are easily able to become the “staff”; the analogy hinges on the relative difficulty required to join the “clergy” v. become a “merchant”.

jrowen 9mo ago

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?

yellowapple 9mo ago
Why would that all be deemed “Not Open Source”?
- jrowen 9mo ago
  My understanding is that something can only be called Open Source (vs. Source Available) if it uses one of the approved licenses that uphold the GNU Four Freedoms of Software. Which isn't a requirement of npm.
  - yellowapple 9mo ago
    Now I'm curious how many NPM packages use non-OSI/FSF-approved licenses.

dfajgljsldkjag 9mo ago

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.

rbanffy 9mo ago
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.
emchammer 9mo ago
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.

uncletaco 9mo ago

> History will probably remember him as LTT, “Linus The Torvalds” This is trolling right?

pstuart 9mo ago
> 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.
asveikau 9mo ago
There are a lot of tangential, one-liner, throwaway jokes in this article.
stronglikedan 9mo ago
Yes, everyone knows LTT is Linus Tech Tips!
yxhuvud 9mo ago
It is a reference to Torvalds making an appearance on the LTT youtube channel, intentionally getting the LTT meaning wrong.

tptacek 9mo ago

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35939383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35939383

deleted 9mo ago
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networkadmin 9mo ago
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- wizzwizz4 9mo ago
  People are still talking about null pointers: that doesn't mean they were ever a good idea.
  - networkadmin 9mo ago
    That's just how the hardware works. Don't like it? Make your own CPU.
    - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
      No, the CPU doesn't have a special pointer value which is designated invalid (except as far as modern address spaces are so large that you cannot possibly map memory to each address without mirroring). In many OSs, e.g. CP/M, address 0 is actually meaningful. The C idiom of cramming sum-type semantics into the nooks and crannies of a return value that ordinarily means something entirely different is an extremely poor one, and null pointers are the poster child: Tony Hoare's billion-dollar mistake. It's absolutely fine to have a packed representation of a sum type "under the hood": this is how Rust implements Option<&T> (where T: Thin), for example. It's also fine to expose the layout of this packed representation to the programmer, as C's union does. But it's a huge footgun to have unchecked casts as the default. If not for this terrible convention, C wouldn't have any unchecked implicit casts: something like f(1 + 0.5) performs a coercion, a far more sensible behaviour. The only reason we're talking about null pointers at all is because they were an influential idea, not because they were a good idea. Likewise with the essay.

renewiltord 9mo ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048954 Rust delenda est.

kiba 9mo ago
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.
- renewiltord 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Y_Y 9mo ago
    Alright Cato, but consider that other countries successfully spend their budgets on public goods like infrastructure and the arts.
    - renewiltord 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Y_Y 9mo ago
        Normally I'd say read a history book, but it might be quicker to read a newspaper.

dgreensp 9mo ago

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.

TZubiri 9mo ago

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.

emanueleo 9mo ago

The article says "GNU's not Linux". No, it's "GNU's not Unix".

robocat 9mo ago
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?
singpolyma3 9mo ago
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...
Kholin 9mo ago
To be fair, there is nothing wrong with either of them.

femto 9mo ago

The post referred to the Sovereign Tech Agency (https://www.sovereign.tech 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579361 Isn't this the situation the Sovereign Tech Agency is trying to avoid?

luplex 9mo ago
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.
einpoklum 9mo ago
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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- marcus_holmes 9mo ago
  Who's going to vet the applicants to ensure that they're not secretly working for bad people, and that as soon as they have sufficient permissions/lack of oversight they'll inject malware into the project and ship it? We're seeing ever-increasing supply chain attacks. All these bazaar projects are vulnerable to that. It's going to take some serious funding to get the kind of oversight we actually need to secure this stuff properly. And the clock's ticking - those maintainers from the 90's are going to retire, and we need to have some way of replacing them

queenkjuul 9mo ago

>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

bigpeopleareold 9mo ago
Whoops, looked him up. Growing a big moustache out and changing my political affiliations as I write this.
- queenkjuul 9mo ago
  I warned you

deadbabe 9mo ago

Cathedral, Megachurch, Bazaar, and now in the age of AI: The Chinese Room.

yxhuvud 9mo ago

If nothing else, the history recap is absolutely brilliant.

utopiah 9mo ago

To the author : "Sovereign Tech Agency. They are funding open source with no strings attached. It’s likely there are other things similar I don’t know about yet (do let me know)." checkout NLNet

zjaffee 9mo ago

One thing that is repeatedly underdiscussed about open source is that every time you have a major open source project become successful, be that anything from Linux to Apache Spark, you have private companies who come in, build something that can very reasonably still be called Linux or Apache Spark, but underneath has tons and tons of extra stuff that they never feed back into the open source community. Hell, I think with the later (since all major cloud providers deploy their own version of spark on their respective data processing cluster services), people don't even know that they aren't in fact using open source software. Hell, eventually you get to a point where companies that choose not to use these third party services eventually just open source their own improvements or abstractions as again separate open source projects that never make it into the upstream project (which are often times heavily influenced by profit making entities). This has been the model for a very long time, going back to at least the likes of redhat. And certainly will be going forward with countless future projects. Maybe there needs to be new models of open source governance, but I have no clue how successful such a thing would even be.

ekianjo 9mo ago
> but underneath has tons and tons of extra stuff that they never feed back into the open source community. Very unlikely for GPL2 projects
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  See cloud provider specific distros, or Android Linux kernel. Thing is, when they misbehave, someone has to have the money to bring them to court.

Projectiboga 9mo ago

This essay's main point was to wander thr Bazaar and rummage around the wares on their tables. He suggests to find some places to contribute. Not in a brash self serving way but looking to make things and one's self better.

kazinator 9mo ago

The only flaw in the introduction of the megachurch to the analogy is that cathedrals were large projects built by megachurches.