> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think most of them want some measure of success and notoriety. I'd imagine the large majority never even get a PR from a stranger. Long tail, you know.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2003 I was somewhere south of Fort Worth, TX, having visited Dinosaur World, and shortly after leaving we stopped at a cafe that had three computers out which you could use. I looked at them while waiting for the coffee and they just seemed off, strange. It wasn't OS 9 nor X, it wasn't Windows... What was it? As I went over to look it hit me - holy cow, those are running that linux thing I've heard about! Their desktops were beautiful, totally different than the others. I knew then I wanted that.
Apple was giving away a C compiler by 1999 afaik, GCC was well established (but going through the egcs drama?). Visual Studio/Visual C++ didn't get a free version until 2005 though.
But yeah imo you're closer to right than not, though Microsoft licenses were still fairly expensive.
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.
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 :)
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.)
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.
(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.
> (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:
HN is a common law system; the real guidelines are the guidelines page itself, and the "jurisprudence" of years and years of Dan (and Tom) writing moderator comments. But you also know you're a little off the rails when you've derived a rule that would prohibit, say, criticism of a book --- "Teach Yourself C In 24 Hours is a bad book". Of course that's OK!
But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated with me too if I just said "CATB is bad!" and left it at that.
People are still talking about a flat Earth and creationism. Given 8 billion people, there are enough available braincells to keep even the stupidest idea floating around in the memesphere.
So the case that you're making here is that CATB is renowned amongst the kind of practitioners who think NULL pointers are "just how the hardware works". Sounds about right.
I know you're replying to a brand new (likely troll) account, but I'm also very confused by this and would be curious to learn if there's any truth to it. I personally don't really see what a Von Neumann machine has to do with null pointers (or how an implication would go either way), but maybe I'm missing something.
NULL pointers working the way they do was a design decision made my hardware engineers a long time ago because it saved some transistors when that mattered. We’re past that point now for most ASICs and hardware can be changed. Although backward software compatibility is a thing too.
Null pointers have nothing to do with the instruction set architecture, except as far as they are often represented by the value 0. Can you describe the scheme you're imagining, whereby their use saves transistors?
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.
While it's narrowly true that CPU instruction sets generally don't have a null-pointer concept, I'm not sure how important that is: the null pointer seems to have been (I don't know enough to be sure) a well-established idiom in assembly programming which carried across naturally to BCPL and C. (In much the same way that record types were, apparently, a common assembly idiom long before they became particularly normal to have in HLLs.) Programmers like being able to null out a pointer field, 0 is an obvious "joker" value, and jump-if-0 instructions tend to be convenient and fast. Whether or not you'd want to say it's "how the hardware works" it does seem to have a certain character of inevitability. Even if the Bell Research guys had disapproved of the idiom they would likely have had difficulty keeping it out of other people's C programs once C became popular. The Hoare ALGOL W thing seems to be more relevant to null pointers in Java and the like.
> Programmers like being able to null out a pointer field, 0 is an obvious "joker" value, and jump-if-0 instructions tend to be convenient and fast.
And there's nothing wrong with that! But you should write it
union {
char *ptr;
size_t scalar;
} my_nullable_pointer;
if (my_nullable_pointer.scalar) {
printf("%s", my_nullable_pointer.ptr);
}
not:
char *my_nullable_pointer;
if (my_nullable_pointer) {
printf("%s", my_nullable_pointer);
}
Yes, this takes up more space, but it also makes the meaning of the code clearer. typedef in a header can bring this down to four extra lines per pointer type in the entire program. Add a macro, and it's five extra lines plus one extra line per pointer type. Put this in the standard library, and the programmer has to type a few extra characters – in exchange for it becoming extremely obvious (to an experienced programmer, or a quick-and-dirty linter) when someone's introduced a null pointer dereference, and when a flawed design makes null pointer dereferences inevitable.
> The Hoare ALGOL W thing seems to be more relevant to null pointers in Java and the like.
I believe you are correct; but I like blaming Tony Hoare for things. He keeps scooping me: I come up with something cool, and then Tony Hoare goes and takes credit for it 50 years in the past. Who does he think he is, Euler?
> No, the CPU doesn't have a special pointer value which is designated invalid
Sort of right, sort of wrong.
From my understanding: older, simpler, architectures treat memory location zero as a normal memory address. On x86 and x64, the OS can configure the MMU to treat certain pages as invalid. Many years ago, I ran across a reference to Sparcs treating accesses to memory location zero as invalid. In other words, it depends upon which architecture you're dealing with.
The 68000 series used 0 as the initial (boot) program counter, and 4 as the initial stack pointer. (I might have those two backwards; it's been a long time.) That meant that they had to be in ROM, which meant that they were not writable. But addresses 8 through 1K were the interrupt vector table, and they did have to be writable.
This led to strange hardware implementations like "0 and 4 point to 0x800000 and 0x800004 (or wherever the ROM is) until a latch is cleared, then they point to 0" - with the latch being cleared fairly early in the boot process. This let you create a different entry point for soft and hard boot, if you wanted.
In that implementation, you could read and write to 0, once the latch was cleared.
Or you could have an implementation where 0 and 4 pointed to ROM always, and you could not have a different entry point for soft boot, and you could not write to 0, ever.
Skimming appendix H of https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/cs423/sp2011/lectures/..., I can't see any special treatment of the zero page, but https://stackoverflow.com/a/22847758/5223757 contains an anecdote about SPARCs not placing a page of zeroes at that address. I expect that's probably an OS restriction, and they considered it safer to modify the in-house software they understood, rather than tinker with the externally-sourced OS's memory management routines, but the anecdote is weak evidence that it might have been a hardware distinction at one point.
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.
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.
The post referred to the Sovereign Tech Agency (https://www.sovereign.tech). The problem that the Sovereign Tech Agency is trying to solve seems to be a hard one.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
Yep and its insane when most devs are actively hostile to unins etc from too much libertarian koolaid when they can see the active backing things like teacher/nurse/police unions provide.
They may have some bad ideas , butthe structure and backing kinda gets glossed over.
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.
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.
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.
If you're talking about Eric S. Raymond here, I'm having trouble not believing that this is just bait. Even in the Linux community, purely on Linux terms he's a problematic and polarizing figure.
I'm annoyed at the arc these discussions invariably take into Raymond's backstory or whatever, because I think CATB fails objectively, on its own merits (or lack thereof) and we don't need to wade into this other stuff. But if we're having the discussion: seems like kind of a wild statement to say he's any reasonable person's role model.
I can't help but disagree with you 100%. Brilliant technicians aren't automatically role models, and both men have plenty of characteristics that shouldn't be emulated.
Their positive influence on open source is real; that doesn't make them, as people, role models.
Technical abilities are nothing more than big muscles. No one with any depth at all would mean anything like that when they say things like "role model" and "saint", and no one with a lick of sense would assume anyone else would.
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.
He very literally said nowhere in there that he thinks rape or non consentual sex or even statutory non-consent is ok.
He very literally spoke nuanced thoughts that were unwise to speak where idiots can hear them. That is his promary failing is failing to understand others well enough to manage his own appearance to them.
Or maybe not even that. Masybe he knowingly and willingly accepts what comes because he has 140x the integrity of you or I who very much manage our appearance to get a more comfortable life at the expense of a more honest one and making the world a better place for everyone else who suffers various things because of all the little injustices you and I and almost everyone else let slide.
Only maybe. Maybe he would happily take a more comfortable life and simply doesn't know how to manage it.
Either way, he never did any such thing as advocate for rape or pedophilia or anything like that. He just didn't repeat the unthinking chant, and even questioned the official gospel is all. You that thing people with the most integrity are supposed to do.
I think enough of us have imperfections that we can appreciate that people who've done wonderful things have also done some very $#!tty things. Someone doesn't need to be a saint to still have a wide, positive influence.
I went looking to refresh my memory, and Wikipedia reminded me about the brief window where ESR lent his voice to the Great Slate and helped raise money for progressive campaigns.
> you may be worried about which box you belong in. ;)
There’s also the risk someone very loud decides to put you in a box you don’t belong in. Eventually you are able to demonstrate it, but, in the meantime, you need to deal with the consequences.
Your post may be insinuating that you put ESR and RMS in such boxes, although you did not actually say that. You might want to clarify that point. (And I say that as someone who has neither upvoted or downvoted you.)
I'll also say that there are enough aspects of our personality and behavior that you might use to justify placing someone in the "bad box" that almost everyone would be in one; and if you were to relax the criteria so that you "average badness" along multiple axes, that comes with its own problems.
> 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?
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"
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
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.
I can see a government requiring itself to provide some funding to open-source projects that it actually makes a lot of use of. But not just open-source in general; no one needs to get funding for some pet project that only that one person cares about and isn't very good anyway: putting some crappy chatGPT-generated code on GitHub should not qualify you for government funding.
There's always a cause and a church. There is an instrument for this: your donations can be tax deductible if you give to a 501c3 that exists for the public benefit. But that's not enough for you guys. Having seen the success of private equity dialysis clinics to redirect Medicare funding, you have decided that you want a piece of this government revenue pie. Enough of this greed.
Don't both, people like them hold society back. I suggest you go out and talk to your physical neighbors about taxing big tech, it has a huge amount of support. The only question is do you want a democratic administration to use said tax revenues to benefit the public or a republican administration to benefit a few private actors.
It's going to happen and I know what side I'd rather be on.
> "...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.
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...
Might want to schedule an appointment for a neurologist because acting like MSFT wasn't anti linux is revisionist history that borders on medical intervention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35939383
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.
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.
But yeah imo you're closer to right than not, though Microsoft licenses were still fairly expensive.
(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.)
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(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.
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
But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated with me too if I just said "CATB is bad!" and left it at that.
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.
And there's nothing wrong with that! But you should write it
not: Yes, this takes up more space, but it also makes the meaning of the code clearer. typedef in a header can bring this down to four extra lines per pointer type in the entire program. Add a macro, and it's five extra lines plus one extra line per pointer type. Put this in the standard library, and the programmer has to type a few extra characters – in exchange for it becoming extremely obvious (to an experienced programmer, or a quick-and-dirty linter) when someone's introduced a null pointer dereference, and when a flawed design makes null pointer dereferences inevitable.> The Hoare ALGOL W thing seems to be more relevant to null pointers in Java and the like.
I believe you are correct; but I like blaming Tony Hoare for things. He keeps scooping me: I come up with something cool, and then Tony Hoare goes and takes credit for it 50 years in the past. Who does he think he is, Euler?
Sort of right, sort of wrong.
From my understanding: older, simpler, architectures treat memory location zero as a normal memory address. On x86 and x64, the OS can configure the MMU to treat certain pages as invalid. Many years ago, I ran across a reference to Sparcs treating accesses to memory location zero as invalid. In other words, it depends upon which architecture you're dealing with.
This led to strange hardware implementations like "0 and 4 point to 0x800000 and 0x800004 (or wherever the ROM is) until a latch is cleared, then they point to 0" - with the latch being cleared fairly early in the boot process. This let you create a different entry point for soft and hard boot, if you wanted.
In that implementation, you could read and write to 0, once the latch was cleared.
Or you could have an implementation where 0 and 4 pointed to ROM always, and you could not have a different entry point for soft boot, and you could not write to 0, ever.
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.
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.
OpenPrinting is listed as a funded project:
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
Isn't this the situation the Sovereign Tech Agency is trying to avoid?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
When something is obviously wrong, perhaps learn to ask yourself if it's trying to be funny. Is dead Python funny?
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 )
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.
>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.
Love it
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.
I'm annoyed at the arc these discussions invariably take into Raymond's backstory or whatever, because I think CATB fails objectively, on its own merits (or lack thereof) and we don't need to wade into this other stuff. But if we're having the discussion: seems like kind of a wild statement to say he's any reasonable person's role model.
Their positive influence on open source is real; that doesn't make them, as people, role models.
>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
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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.
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Kinda getting grossed out so I'm gonna stop
He very literally spoke nuanced thoughts that were unwise to speak where idiots can hear them. That is his promary failing is failing to understand others well enough to manage his own appearance to them.
Or maybe not even that. Masybe he knowingly and willingly accepts what comes because he has 140x the integrity of you or I who very much manage our appearance to get a more comfortable life at the expense of a more honest one and making the world a better place for everyone else who suffers various things because of all the little injustices you and I and almost everyone else let slide.
Only maybe. Maybe he would happily take a more comfortable life and simply doesn't know how to manage it.
Either way, he never did any such thing as advocate for rape or pedophilia or anything like that. He just didn't repeat the unthinking chant, and even questioned the official gospel is all. You that thing people with the most integrity are supposed to do.
There’s also the risk someone very loud decides to put you in a box you don’t belong in. Eventually you are able to demonstrate it, but, in the meantime, you need to deal with the consequences.
I'll also say that there are enough aspects of our personality and behavior that you might use to justify placing someone in the "bad box" that almost everyone would be in one; and if you were to relax the criteria so that you "average badness" along multiple axes, that comes with its own problems.
It's a joke
I didn't make it past the tldr lol is this some kind of poisoned data for GPT 6?
“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
Rust delenda est.
Rust delenda est.
It's going to happen and I know what side I'd rather be on.
I'll leave the monthly rate math to you there.
Rust delenda est.
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...
Microsoft messaging was very clear at the time