3 ms·

As you point out in your linked comment, the original essay captured the zeitgeist of the time. It also influenced and inspired many people. From that perspecti

by sethev 9mo ago

As you point out in your linked comment, the original essay captured the zeitgeist of the time. It also influenced and inspired many people. From that perspective, it's hard for me to agree that it was bad. However, I don't think the content was original at the time (perhaps that's what you mean by bad?) - in the sense that ESR wasn't out ahead of people blazing some new trail and it also didn't hold up very well factually.

Taniwha 9mo ago
Yeah, it's worth remembering that at the time a compiler cost $10k+, an OS $1000s/year - you couldn't work on OS or compiler work unless you worked for a big hardware company - a whole lot of interesting work was locked away from most programmers
- sethev 9mo ago
  Yes, that is the context in which I first read it (likely around 1999 when it appeared on slashdot), as a senior in high school with no access to the tools used by most professional programmers at the time.
  - tptacek 9mo ago
    FreeBSD 2.0 was 1994.
    - sethev 9mo ago
      Yes, I'm speaking about my experience as I remember it - not what was objectively possible for someone with the right resources and knowledge at the time :)
      - tptacek 9mo ago
        Right, I'm not so much pushing back on you as I am establishing a chronology for CATB. Ordinary people were absolutely belting out (what we would now call) open source software by the time it was written. (That's not the biggest flaw in the essay, of course. It made predictions, some of which turned out to be comically wrong. The true parts of it weren't new, and the new parts of it weren't true.)
- jaredklewis 9mo ago
  Wasn’t Cathedral and the Bazaar originally published in 1999? Who was paying thousands of dollars a year for an OS in 199? And I think GCC was already widespread by then, no? I didn’t start programming until a few years later, but for sure by 2002, it seemed to me a given that compilers were free. It was my impression that stuff like Borland was niche and that serious stuff like Java and C were free. Not saying you are wrong, just your comment surprised me. Maybe I have a revisionist memory or maybe those intervening 3 years were quite transformational in the industry.
  - tptacek 9mo ago
    The firm I was at in 1997 was shipping commercial software with GCC. There were expensive compilers, but you weren't required to use them. For Windows builds, I think we were Borland C++, which was hundreds of dollars. Sun had a pretty expensive compiler for Solaris that I remember using for hunting down memory leaks.
  - LevGoldstein 9mo ago
    I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k. Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.
  - duskwuff 9mo ago
    2002 was before the tipping point, IMO. Open-source software existed, but wasn't always taken seriously. Linux was still widely perceived as being a hobbyist OS unsuitable for "real" applications. A lot of the Internet still ran on Windows and commercial UNIX servers.
    - tptacek 9mo ago
      By 2002 I was at Arbor Networks, shipping security software to tier-1 ISPs, and if we'd shipped it on a commercial Unix (let alone Windows) people would have looked at us like we had 2 heads. The writing was on the wall by end of the first dot com boom.
tptacek 9mo ago
It was certainly influential. It's just bad on its own merits.
- bawolff 9mo ago
  I guess it depends on what you think the goal of the essay was. I always felt like the primary goal was to inspire people and a lot of the software engineering parts were more framing. To me it reads as a manifesto disguised as a software engineering essay. If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.
- lurk2 9mo ago
  > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - tptacek 9mo ago
    (1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents). It isn't a general prohibition on critique, which would be silly. (2) You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.
    - lurk2 9mo ago
      > (1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents). There’s nothing I’m seeing in the text as it is written that suggests this to be the case. There are just a lot of comments I see that amount to: “I don’t like this,” which can be an interesting signal by itself but not if users refuse to elaborate on it, which is what I (erroneously) thought was happening here. > You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad. I did miss it, sorry. I clicked through and didn’t notice that the top comment was yours. I assumed you were just linking to a past discussion. I’m sure you already know this, but on the off chance you don’t, you can click on a comment’s timestamp to get a permalink to the specific comment, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940773

by sethev 9mo ago

Taniwha 9mo ago

Yeah, it's worth remembering that at the time a compiler cost $10k+, an OS $1000s/year - you couldn't work on OS or compiler work unless you worked for a big hardware company - a whole lot of interesting work was locked away from most programmers

sethev 9mo ago
Yes, that is the context in which I first read it (likely around 1999 when it appeared on slashdot), as a senior in high school with no access to the tools used by most professional programmers at the time.
- tptacek 9mo ago
  FreeBSD 2.0 was 1994.
  - sethev 9mo ago
    Yes, I'm speaking about my experience as I remember it - not what was objectively possible for someone with the right resources and knowledge at the time :)
    - tptacek 9mo ago
      Right, I'm not so much pushing back on you as I am establishing a chronology for CATB. Ordinary people were absolutely belting out (what we would now call) open source software by the time it was written. (That's not the biggest flaw in the essay, of course. It made predictions, some of which turned out to be comically wrong. The true parts of it weren't new, and the new parts of it weren't true.)
jaredklewis 9mo ago
Wasn’t Cathedral and the Bazaar originally published in 1999? Who was paying thousands of dollars a year for an OS in 199? And I think GCC was already widespread by then, no? I didn’t start programming until a few years later, but for sure by 2002, it seemed to me a given that compilers were free. It was my impression that stuff like Borland was niche and that serious stuff like Java and C were free. Not saying you are wrong, just your comment surprised me. Maybe I have a revisionist memory or maybe those intervening 3 years were quite transformational in the industry.
- tptacek 9mo ago
  The firm I was at in 1997 was shipping commercial software with GCC. There were expensive compilers, but you weren't required to use them. For Windows builds, I think we were Borland C++, which was hundreds of dollars. Sun had a pretty expensive compiler for Solaris that I remember using for hunting down memory leaks.
- LevGoldstein 9mo ago
  I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k. Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.
- duskwuff 9mo ago
  2002 was before the tipping point, IMO. Open-source software existed, but wasn't always taken seriously. Linux was still widely perceived as being a hobbyist OS unsuitable for "real" applications. A lot of the Internet still ran on Windows and commercial UNIX servers.
  - tptacek 9mo ago
    By 2002 I was at Arbor Networks, shipping security software to tier-1 ISPs, and if we'd shipped it on a commercial Unix (let alone Windows) people would have looked at us like we had 2 heads. The writing was on the wall by end of the first dot com boom.

tptacek 9mo ago

It was certainly influential. It's just bad on its own merits.

bawolff 9mo ago
I guess it depends on what you think the goal of the essay was. I always felt like the primary goal was to inspire people and a lot of the software engineering parts were more framing. To me it reads as a manifesto disguised as a software engineering essay. If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.
lurk2 9mo ago
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tptacek 9mo ago
  (1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents). It isn't a general prohibition on critique, which would be silly. (2) You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.
  - lurk2 9mo ago
    > (1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents). There’s nothing I’m seeing in the text as it is written that suggests this to be the case. There are just a lot of comments I see that amount to: “I don’t like this,” which can be an interesting signal by itself but not if users refuse to elaborate on it, which is what I (erroneously) thought was happening here. > You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad. I did miss it, sorry. I clicked through and didn’t notice that the top comment was yours. I assumed you were just linking to a past discussion. I’m sure you already know this, but on the off chance you don’t, you can click on a comment’s timestamp to get a permalink to the specific comment, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940773