Just 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.<p>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).<p>Even the high-level organizing notion of "cathedrals" and "bazaars", which should have been a lay-up, hasn't really proven out.
Related (surprisingly little over the years) - others?<p><i>The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829361" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829361</a> - May 2023 (2 comments)<p><i>On Management and the Maginot Line</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314682" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314682</a> - Oct 2022 (27 comments)<p><i>The Cathedral and the Bazaar</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328219" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328219</a> - Feb 2018 (1 comment)<p><i>The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2000)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198625" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198625</a> - July 2016 (1 comment)<p><i>Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754279" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754279</a> - May 2016 (57 comments)<p><i>Revisiting the many eyes theory</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416597" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416597</a> - Oct 2014 (1 comment)<p><i>A Second look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222945" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222945</a> - March 2010 (1 comment)<p><i>The Cathedral and the Bazaar</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162376" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162376</a> - April 2008 (2 comments)
I 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.<p>You <i>can</i> 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.
The ending paragraphs:<p>> 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!<p>> 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.<p>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.
This 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?<p>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?
Still I think incredibly useful frames for interpetting the world.<p>Society so visibly can see & understand Cathedral entities. And we still are so weak at grokking the rhiziomatic Bazaar assemblages that happen.
The 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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/a-case-study/9781098114596/ch01.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/a-case-study/9781098114...</a>
Old 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The perennial issue with open source is funding, but this reflects some peculiarities of the most decentralized type of bazaar.<p>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.
I 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
The Wolfram effect <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20071283" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20071283</a> seems nearly as strong as ever on this topic.
A counter point:<p><a href="https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257" rel="nofollow">https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257</a>
The thing I always notice about this is that nearly every piece of software in my life is Cathedral model.<p>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.