
Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19 - alxsanchez
https://opensource.com/life/16/5/19-years-later-cathedral-and-bazaar-still-moves-us
======
mwfunk
There are lots of interesting observations and historical tidbits in ESR's
writing, but it needs to be taken with a sizable grain of salt for it to not
do more harm than good. He presents himself like a social scientist finding
hidden truths by connecting dots that no one has thought to connect before,
and I'm pretty sure that's what he thinks he's doing, but the core of what he
does is come up with narratives, try to find facts to support those
narratives, and selectively ignore facts that don't support those narratives.

He clearly prioritizes narratives over analysis, with heroes and villains and
truth and lies and good and evil and grand forces of history shaping the world
in ways only he can perceive. If he was really serious about being a software
historian, he would spent a lot less time in "I'm just telling you like it is,
I've got a bibliography with citations and everything" mode, and a lot more
time actively looking for evidence that refutes his claims in the interest of
evolving his views. He would also use phrases like "us" and "them" and "elders
of our tribe" and "I'm your worst nightmare" and "do you even know who I
am?!?" a lot less often (like, never).

Once I noticed that he was basically writing a story in which he was his own
Mary Sue [1], I could never unsee it. :( That sucked because I really did
enjoy and learn from reading his stuff during the peak-ESR years of the mid-
to-late-'90s.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue)

~~~
coldtea
It gets worse:

(...) Desperate for something to feed my jones, I snaffled my other sister's
abandoned flute. And wow! I was a natural...immediately better with it than
with the guitar I'd been hacking at for months. I was commuting to college at
the time, and took it with me. I'd play as I walked between classes. Six weeks
from a cold standing start I sat in with a professional jazz band for the
first time...and they liked it. This was delightful but mystifying. All I'd
had to do was learn to play a scale, and this amazing river of music poured
forth with barely an effort on my part. It seemed almost as though my hands
and lips had always known what to do, had been waiting for me to pick up the
flute. (...) Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to
me. Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered "YOU!"
And his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And
his, too the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even
before I knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and
poetry. [1]

And worse:
[http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/bedplay.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/bedplay.html)

[1] Strong vibes of:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CYF9Ge2JL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CYF9Ge2JL0)

~~~
hinkley
It's not like Richard Stallman is a paragon of mental health. That leaves
Linus Torvalds. I am so whelmed I can't stand it.

~~~
tptacek
Richard Stallman isn't an analyst or a historian. He's an activist, and from
all available evidence a remarkably genuine and focused activist. I don't
agree with a lot of what RMS believes (for instance: I'm just fine with DRM),
but I respect him.

The same isn't true of Eric Raymond.

------
Camillo
I was always turned off by this book's title. It really doesn't fit at all as
a metaphor.

In the middle ages, cathedrals were collaborative, public works projects. A
whole city or town came together to build one. People from all social strata
donated money or work to build the most splendid building they could. The
final result was a public space open to all citizens, with no commercial
purpose.

On the other hand, a bazaar is literally a market, where people go to buy and
sell their wares. It's all about the profit, not the common good, and it's all
about competition, not collaboration.

Even if you want to ignore the entire free software aspect and focus entirely
on the pure technical benefits of open source, the cathedral is the far
superior artifact from an engineering point of view. And where is the openness
in the bazaar? As if the merchant is going to tell you how much he paid for
his wares, or how they were made.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I like that angle, it's a new way to think about cathedrals for me.

With respect to free software though, the pertinent aspect of these
architectures is the forkability. Once the cathedral is designed, there is no
room for anything off script. You can't have your own services in the
cathedral on Tuesday nights.

But if you don't like the way your meat lady treats her chickens, you can just
open up your own poultry stand across the path from her. There isn't a central
plan. The plan emerges from the voluntary action of the participants.

~~~
bhandziuk
Maybe not from that one product (a single cathedral) but after it has been
built knowledge has been gained on how to create flying buttressed, move stone
around efficiently, build a foundation, etc. So if you had another large
project you could benefit from this gain in societal knowledge.

~~~
smhenderson
Well the people that built those cathedrals generally kept the techniques of
masonry a secret. Sure, people were free to use the fruits of their labors
(for various shades of free) but that knowledge wasn't generally made
available to all when the cathedral was finished. If you wanted another
cathedral you had to go to the same (or similar) people who built the first
one.

Masons of the time closely guarded their secrets, like source code from a
vendor like Microsoft, Oracle, etc...

------
beat
It's kind of weird, that we're starting to get a generation of new programmers
who weren't even born when that essay came out.

I'm starting to feel that teaching a history of computer science (in terms of
sociology and insights, not just programming) would be a great addition to the
curriculum in college. Some familiarity with classics like _The Cathedral and
the Bazaar_ , Fred Brooks' _The Mythical Man-Month_ (which predates even my
old-timer ass), _The Agile Manifesto_ , and other masterpieces would teach
students a lot that they may otherwise have to learn the hard way, or won't
learn at all.

~~~
firasd
Yeah. I had that feeling when I came across Turing's original article about
the Turing Test a few months ago
[http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html](http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html).
And other classics like Feynman on the Challenger disaster:
[http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm](http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm)

Maybe we should start aggregating the more "timeless" books/articles we
recommend. I'll probably start something on Github or Medium like for my own
recommendations.

College CS courses (at least in my limited experience) are so far from day-to-
day software engineering that I don't hold out much hope that they'd assign
these kinda readings though. A few months ago I wrote about how reading Joel
on Software was useful to me while I was getting into the field:
[https://medium.com/@firasd/things-i-read-on-joel-on-
software...](https://medium.com/@firasd/things-i-read-on-joel-on-software-
that-came-true-cd201c03cf58)

~~~
firasd
(Replying since out of edit time window) One more contemporary link I'd put on
such a list is "My Heroku Values"
[https://gist.github.com/adamwiggins/5687294](https://gist.github.com/adamwiggins/5687294)

~~~
beat
Oh, that's a good one! I've had to learn a lot of that the hard way in this
whole startup founder path... :(

------
smhenderson
I know ESR is not necessarily the most loved person in the OSS/FOSS
development communities these days, along with RMS and, heck, even Brice
Perens and Ian Murdock in some circles, but I got into free software because
of these guys. I had paid for compilers for DOS, and then Windows and then a
new one came along and, etc, etc.

My searches for free C compilers led me to GCC, which led me to GNU and Linux
and ultimately to a lot of writing by the above individuals. I am hardly
unique in this respect so love them or hate them, ESR, and so many others that
have been there since the early days have made huge contributions to free
software and I for one am still grateful to this day.

Here's to another 19 years!

~~~
pron
I find it a bit chilling that you put ESR alongside RMS. RMS highlights the
political aspects of software; ESR is just your run-of-the-mill disgusting
internet misogynist[1], homophobe[2] and xenophobe[3] who once advocated open
source.

[1]: [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907)

[2]: [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26)

[1]: [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129)

~~~
smhenderson
OK, fair enough. I thought about putting in a comment about how much I
disagree with ESR on most things these days. But this paper came out before he
started using his sudden exposure as a soap box. I was trying to keep things
centered on the spirit of F/OSS as I saw it when I was much younger and way
more interested in code and systems than politics.

But since we opened that can now, yes, homophobic, racist writing based on a
flawed understanding of libertarian-ism and it's worst qualities have done a
lot to dampen my opinion of him in the last 10 years or so...

RMS I still read and tend to agree with even though he is just as maligned in
some modern communities as ESR, just for very different reasons.

------
mrbill
One of my strange life experiences: I was working for an ISP that was based in
San Antonio and the 55th WorldCon was being held in SA that year ('97). The
boss and some coworkers wanted to go, so I tagged along - it was either that,
or go back to my extended-stay motel for the evening.

At some point we ended up in a small conference room with a few other people;
mostly ISP-industry people (I think Avi Freedman was there).

I ended up in a lengthy discussion with the guy sitting across from me. We
chatted for probably 20 minutes before he turned and I saw his con badge.
"Eric Raymond".

"Eric Raymond? Jargon File Eric Raymond?" He _beamed_ and was happy that
someone recognized him. I joked and did a Wayne's World-style "I'm not
worthy!" and thanked him for his work on it, as it had been part of the
inspiration that made me end up in a career as a system admin.

------
SwellJoe
I've been thinking about the history of computing spanning my 30+ years of
involvement with it (I got my first computer when I was 8). Things moved _so
fast_ back then (C64 was released in 1982, and the Amiga just three years
later in 1985, Linux came six years after that in 1991), but in many regards
have only accelerated since then. The arc of Open Source and Free software is
perhaps the most interesting and powerful invisible force in our world today.

Imagine the Internet _without_ Apache, Linux, MySQL, etc. And, it's moved
further out, as well...now Open Source powers most of the clients, too
(Android, Chrome, Firefox; the way people interact with computers is, under
the hood, Open Source). This is an incredible shift. Microsoft and Apple (and
a few others) fought for years...and, eventually they didn't really matter
anymore. Those companies are at the edges now; some people still choose to use
their products, but they don't define the architecture of our lives in tech.

It's weird to think back to the world in which _CATB_ was written. OSS was a
band of insurgents. Today, OSS is the norm, and it's the biggest gift economy
in the world. It's not perfect, of course; loads of companies make huge
profits exploiting OSS without participating meaningfully (and I'm not saying
I have solutions for that). But, I like the world that the band of OSS
insurgents has built better than the world they (we? I've been around it, and
participating in OSS projects my whole adult life, and since well before
_CATB_ was written, but I still don't really feel part of it) started with.

And, I find it weird/amazing that today more Open Source code is likely being
written and released daily than was written and released in a whole year back
then (I'm making up this ratio, but I believe it's a reasonable guesstimate).
Also feeling a bit old right now. It really doesn't feel like that long ago.

------
nomadlogic
Can't believe it's been that long - whew. Here is an interesting counterpoint
to this work by PHK:

[http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257)

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's a great counterpoint, too. Both essays seem right. I think the solution
is a hybrid... something in the middle as usual. I think an exploration into
hybrid models that build on both traits is the best route. I'm eyeballing Rust
as an example as it has a team doing Cathedral model with guidance and
ecosystem from Bazaars. I see good and bad in it that come from aspects of
both. Very interesting.

------
davidw
ESR has said some wacky stuff over the years, but this was a hugely
influential bit of writing, and I'm very grateful to him for it.

------
edem
This book (and the essay "How to become a hacker") marked the start of my
programming career. Thanks ESR!

~~~
gaastonsr
Whoa you had a great start then ;)

------
chmaynard
Is 19 years a significant milestone? Let's see, 19 can be expressed as 10 in
base 19. Ah, now I understand. 🤓

------
facepalm
What has become of him?

~~~
adsche
Racist ramblings.

"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent
crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they
average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population?" \--
[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129)

Also:
[https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/669592461111599105](https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/669592461111599105)

There's more, I'm sure you can find it. Honestly, makes me sick how he's
celebrated here. "Sure he has said some wacky(really?!) things but whatever
I'm grateful." Done with HN for the day.

