
The Cathedral and the Bizarre - bronsa
http://marktarver.com/thecathedralandthebizarre.html
======
dwohnitmok
It is perhaps useful to understand where the author is coming from.

The author is very critical of open source on the whole. He has a series of
articles detailing criticisms of open source software.

[http://marktarver.com/problems.html](http://marktarver.com/problems.html)
(The Problems of Open Source)
[http://marktarver.com/open.html](http://marktarver.com/open.html) (In Praise
of Closed Source)

He is the inventor of the Qi (later Shen) language (essentially a Lisp dialect
with a configurable type system). He experimented with taking it open source.
He was very underwhelmed by the results and has made later revisions closed
source again. In particular as far as I can tell he felt he was losing
creative control of the project and getting little to nothing back for it in
terms of contributions and features (and in general very unimpressed with
people's reaction to the language and the wider programming community's
capability of understanding the language).

He has also had at least one argument on Reddit about this (see the post by
Mark_Tarver here
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/57h33q/arguing...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/57h33q/arguing_against_opensource_shen_programming/)).

This is one article in a long series of events and thoughts for him that have
played out over the past decade.

~~~
iudqnolq
HN makes an appearance:

> This is the time when reddit made an appearance. I blessed the Shen
> subreddit because I thought that reddit was some polite ladies bookclub -
> obviously showing my ignorance of it. It is nothing of the sort of course
> and some of its most vicious sites like Coontown - the reddit for racists
> only recently closed - shows what is so often like. Reddit is a shit hole;
> and to a lesser degree so are SlashDot, and Hacker News.

> Unfortunately some members of the Shen group, imbibing the mindshare poison,
> gave much power away to the opinions on reddit.

> The OS fanatics relished their power to bully and shame and people used to
> mail me and say 'You need to say something because XYZ has said such and
> such on reddit'. I did on occasion call such people 'complete prats', but
> really this was whack-a-mole because the supply of arseholes was unending.

------
ohazi
It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His
argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable."

When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious
projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not
referring to random crap on Github.

The serious projects are _actually_ better than their closed-source
counterparts, both in quality, and in their ability to be extended and
customized. Customization is not going to be cheap or easy, but it will at
least be possible.

The fact that I wrote a toy renderer in Rust five years ago and haven't
touched it since then doesn't change this. The fact that there are 100 or 1000
times as many toy projects as there are serious projects doesn't change this
either.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> most open source code is poor or unusable

Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better? If we
can count the sea of abandonware on Github, then we get to count the mountain
of "interesting" code that remains internal to large companies, or worse, the
stuff that actually got released on unsuspecting customers.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Generally, a business pays developers to write software that it expects to be
put to immediate use, which means that most of the time it functions, at least
minimally. I'm sure exceptions exist, of course.

FLOSS abandonware has no such constraint.

~~~
perl4ever
Generally, _expectations_ do not define reality.

I'm not just being contrary, I've worked on a project for a year or two that
got scrapped, and I think it happens a lot.

Another way to look at it, is that if you have programmers that are regular
employees and not temps or something, you might as well have them work on
something that's not very important, or that's risky, when you don't have
something better for them to do, because you're paying them anyway.

~~~
codyb
I’m convinced if they stopped paying us all to rewrite things that work the
market would fall out from under us.

Every job I’ve ever been involved with has always had some code base that was
in framework X and now needs to be in framework Y, or on in house hardware and
needs to move to the cloud, etc etc.

And having just interviewed every place has a project like that. “We were
using PHP for the mvp but are moving to RoR”, “We were using class based react
but now we’re using hooks”, etc etc.

I feel half of it is valuable migrations and half of it is to always have
something on our plates.

And it always has to get done yesterday. What a world.

~~~
vinay_ys
Most software engineers I know love to build software for the sake of itself.
They are not all that interested in the business. Most businesses for which
software is being produced is not personally relatable or interesting to most
software engineers.

To keep engineers motivated, the work has to have sufficient amount technical
accomplishments and not just churning out business features.

Luckily, due to continuous growth in market and scale of users, and
improvements in hardware, there is opportunity for serious amount of technical
work in any project.

Also, faster time to market is of real business value. Compromises are done in
ideal perfect designs to meet timelines (or resource constraints) – hence,
tech debt occurs and it is real and just as useful as financial debt to help
scale a business in a competing marketplace.

And speculative/iterative market feedback based development is also real. All
these things add up to one thing – things that were right for yesterday isn't
right for tomorrow.

So we have to rewrite or refactor software continuously. And that's perfectly
normal. It is actually one of the biggest strengths of software based
solutions – that we can change things live - while it is already in use -
change the engines of the rocket while it is flying - so to speak. We have to
embrace this and leverage it disruptively.

Those who pine for perfect software are denying realities of the larger real-
world.

------
xorand
>...an article puts the abandonment rate of open source projects on Github at
about 98% - meaning that there is no activity on 98% of projects after a year
[0]. This has coined a phrase - abandonware.

I'm not a programmer, I'm a researcher. Let me tell you a fact: about 100% of
research articles are not updated.

Somehow the link [0] cited in the article makes an indirect similar point, but
what's wrong with programs which are not updated? After all there is a (small)
group of people who keep telling that programs are the next level in
mathematics, (ideally they are) better than proofs.

[0] [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/open-source-failure-
is-...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/open-source-failure-is-its-
greatest-success/)

~~~
doublement
Moreover he's using the large amount of wreckage to argue that the Darwinian
process of selecting "category killers" isn't working, which is completely
backwards.

If "category killer" is a winner-take-all competition, then there are going to
be a vast number of losers, and we do see a vast number of unmaintained
projects. It's just that no one is bothering to remove them from view when
they're defeated.

~~~
Terretta
The analogy might be clearer if instead of GitHub we used Fossil.

~~~
BlueTemplar
He _does_ talk about how huge corporations use open source and exploit open
source developers for their own profit...

------
braythwayt
I’m saying nothing for or against the rest of the article, but this one
sentence does not describe software as I know it: _“But above all this is the
sheer waste of human effort in terms of the production of rotting software in
repositories.”_

The act of writing code changes the programmer. I have written many things
that didn’t turn into successful open source, nor did they act as resume-ware.
But the act of writing them taught me something.

There is no waste of human effort involved when you practice your craft. This
is like telling me that if I climb a cliff and then lower myself back to the
ground, I haven’t gone anywhere.

Right now I’m working on implementing a subset of regular expressions that
compile to finite-state recognizers. There is a zero-percent chance that my
working code will be used in production.

So what? I am learning something about pattern-matching, and perhaps it will
grow into a little language like SNOBOL.

[http://raganwald.com/2019/09/21/regular-
expressions.html](http://raganwald.com/2019/09/21/regular-expressions.html)

If that is a waste, then most of my most enjoyable moments programming were
also a waste.

~~~
zozbot234
> _But above all this is the sheer waste of human effort in terms of the
> production of rotting software in repositories._

Yup, what about the amount of human effort that has been wasted in the course
of producing off-the-shelf proprietary software? How much of that proprietary
stuff is now entirely useless, for some reason or another? It's just so weird
to make an _engineering_ -focused argument for proprietary stuff, when the
only case that's even remotely plausible is about production incentives, and
everything else hugely favors FLOSS.

As an aside, I'm pretty sure that, in the medium-to-long run, we'll manage to
fund FLOSS development to an entirely satisfactory extent via crowdfunding,
and that while saving a _lot_ of dough compared to what it would take to fund
proprietary development in the same way.

But in fact, even his point about support revenues is misguided. Well-designed
and easy-to-use software does not really draw fewer paid-support arrangements
than software that's hackish, unintuitive and the like. The nees for paid
support is almost entirely an _organizational_ one, so it matters zilch how
easy the software is to support in reality; it's far more important that the
organization can point to that support contract if any such need should arise.

------
traverseda
I have like 30 projects on github, I don't expect any of them to really go
anywhere, it's just where I put stuff when I'm playing with a new concept.

There are ~3 projects that I would have actually have liked to go somewhere,
real projects not toys, that I have abandoned.

So that "98% of projects" statistic is fair, but I think those numbers would
be looking a lot better if you accounted for the fact that github is just a
place to throw stuff up. Just because something is on github doesn't mean it's
an open source "project".

~~~
bsder
> I have like 30 projects on github, I don't expect any of them to really go
> anywhere, it's just where I put stuff when I'm playing with a new concept.

Then why put it there?

git works fine without github. And by putting your projects on github all you
did was add to the baseline white noise that people have to filter through.

~~~
saagarjha
Where should I put it? Or are you suggesting not sharing it at all?

~~~
BlueTemplar
My view is different from the person you're answering to, but - on an actual
open-source based website that hasn't been bought by a closed-source
transnational corporation ?

------
antoineMoPa
Lots of proprietary software are abandoned & unmaintained on old storage
devices, the statistic about abandoned software on Github is meaningless.

On quality: quality is very suggestive. Quality changes if you factor in
questions such as: Does it run well on low-end devices, does it track you,
will it still open your files in 10 years, will the company still exist in 10
years, does it work well on many platforms, can it be automated, etc.

------
vinay_ys
Writing software within old-school enterprises is a daunting task involving
lots of proprietary systems that create a lock-in of sorts. Complex build and
test systems, complex deployment and production systems are the norm. Weird
tools and libraries with their own proprietary names and conventions increase
the learning curve for any new-joinee. Some even have very proprietary non-
standard language, runtime etc. making the skills acquired in such
environments to be largely useless outside of such environments.

Open source culture changed all this drastically. This culture started with
individuals loosely connected via Internet who collaborated on writing
software and without much complex central infrastructure. Common conventions
and standards emerged as these individuals openly discussed them and took with
them to other projects – not just conventions and standards, but also the
code. Without the enterprise lock-in, this has proven to be extremely
successful and cost-effective.

Most commercial software companies today follow this new model for their
internal software development practices. Using openly available technology
components lets everyone to acquire portable skills that they can continue to
improve throughout their careers across many different companies. This
drastically reduces the cost of software production as cost of acquiring
skills is amortized over many companies and cost of development effort of
these open source standardized components is also amortized over many
corporations/projects.

Every company I worked in has supported contributing to open-source with the
selfish motive to attract talented engineers. And the engineers like
contributing to open-source projects as a way of showing off their skills and
building their resume.

~~~
benibela
Unfortunately that only leads to another kind of lock-in. The culture assumes
everyone is using the same tools, so you are not allowed to use any kind of
non mainstream software. And any smaller project using non mainstream
libraries gets killed.

For example I use Mercurial rather than Git. Mercurial had better Windows
support, a better command line syntax and with TortoiseHg a better Linux GUI.
However, it happens all the time that linux distributions include wrong
versions of Mercurial and TortoiseHg. You can use an old version of Mercurial
and an old version of TortoiseHg, or a new version of Mercurial and an new
version of TortoiseHg, but the distributions package a new version of
Mercurial and an old version of TortoiseHg, and then TortoiseHg does not
start. So they ship a completely broken package and no one cares because it is
not a standard tool. (and last time I tried to install TortoiseHg from source
separately, it also did not run, because was not compatible to the Python
version installed by the distribution)

Recently I wanted to use a tool written in OCaml. It is really well written,
has a GUI, using gnomecanvas. And it does not start anymore. Debian/Ubuntu has
decided, gnomecanvas from gnome2 is deprecated and will no longer be
installed. But the new gnome does not seem to have OCaml bindings. I am not
aware of anyone working on a update to fix that. OCaml is too small to be
allowed to make GUIs.

I write my software in FreePascal. After a system update, my projects do not
start anymore on Android. Turns out binutils has enabled relro by default and
FreePascal does not work with relro enabled. Imagine GCC could not create
Android apps in the default settings. That would be fixed quickly, but with
FreePascal no one cares

------
Palomides
there's a lot of nits to pick about this essay, but the real punchline is that
corporations have reaped the profits from open source software, far more than
any developers do directly, and that claim seems hard to dispute.

~~~
m463
I think a lot of people have reaped the benefits of open source software. And
corporations are formed of people.

It is a check and balance on proprietary software, in quality, cost, privacy
and independence.

It has benefitted developers directly, in education, in transferrence of
skills to other employers, and in direct customization of software for their
personal needs.

~~~
buzzkillington
> And corporations are formed of people.

So was the Nazi party.

The problem is with the distribution of benefits. Much like the vaulted
Lebensraum the question is who gets the land and who gets to be fertilizer for
the land.

So far the answer to the first is Bezos, and to the second is everyone who
isn't Bezos. A distribution that leaves something to be desired of.

~~~
Guthur
Utter nonsense. There are many people getting great benefit from Amazon other
than bezos. Including many of people employed there and the many investors
that have reaped benefit from the stock increase.

~~~
teh_klev
> There are many people getting great benefit from Amazon other than bezos.
> _Including many of people employed there_

[https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+warehouse+workers](https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+warehouse+workers)

------
skybrian
The article is wrong in attributing "open source" to Eric Raymond alone. As
it's now used, it was apparently coined by Christine Patterson and mutually
agreed to at a meeting where Eric Raymond was present in February 5, 1998. [1]

According to the release history, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was written
in 1997, but originally used the term "free software". The term was changed to
"open source" on February 9th. [2]

[1] [https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-
source...](https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-
software) [2] [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
bazaar/cathedral...](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/)

------
sdenton4
"No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any
importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative
software ought to play by a different set of rules."

Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a
movie.

~~~
sildur
A novel also is produced by a “herd”. There are a lot of people involved.
People that make suggestions, corrections, the editor... It’s not a single
person effort.

~~~
thaumasiotes
_Naked Came the Stranger_ was written, not just produced, by a herd, to
massive success. (It was intended to fail, and the herd writing was an element
of that intention, but none of that stopped it from experiencing massive
success.)

~~~
0xcde4c3db
See also: _Atlanta Nights_ , another sort of "successful failure" group-
written project meant to demonstrate that an alleged "publisher" was really a
vanity press with no actual standards or editorial process. You can now buy
the book via various links from the official website of the "author" [1], but
in case you're in need of a few giggles _right this minute_ , the submitted
manuscript was also released by one of the conspirators [2].

[1] [http://www.travistea.com/](http://www.travistea.com/)

[2]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20050305143929/http://www.cs.du....](https://web.archive.org/web/20050305143929/http://www.cs.du.edu/~aburt/StingManuscript.pdf)

~~~
saagarjha
Is that…all? It says 71,503 words at the top but I only see a hundred…

~~~
0xcde4c3db
It's readable (y'know, _technically_ ) for me in Firefox 71. Maybe there's
something weird about the PDF?

------
bawolff
A main point of this seems to be that most projects on github are abandoned.

What a stupid comparison. That would be like listing all the commercial
projects that go out of bussiness, or dont even progress far enough to get
funding in the first place, and saying closed source model is a failure
because most closed source projects fail.

------
r00fus
This article seems to leave out _why_ open-source changed it's meaning from
"source available" to "source shared". That results from the FSF, GNU,
copyleft and the rise of Linux.

⌘-F show only two references to GNU or Stallman, both derogatory references to
Emacs. All references to Linux are about how early versions sucked and how it
was a "copy" of Unix.

This highlights a lack of understanding from the author which may explain a
lot of the viewpoints.

------
colin_mccabe
The harsh reality is that most software, no matter whether it's open source or
closed, never makes it big. Take a stroll through an app store on iPhone-- or
better yet, on Android! just to see how many apps there. You'll find hundreds
of flashlight apps, calendar apps, and so on. Buggy, abandoned software is
hardly unique to open source.

Then there is the argument that "open source isn't innovative." This seems
like a really tired argument. Most software of any kind can be painted as just
a mere modification or variation on something that someone once wrote in the
past. We've had almost a century of software, after all. I also like the links
to late-90s and 2000-era websites saying that Linux will never be innovative.
The only way this could be better is if we could create a deep fake of Steve
Ballmer saying it onstage.

But wait! Tensorflow is open source, so we can't use that, clearly. Financial
deficiency disease and all. Luckily, I'm willing to make a special enterprise
edition for this guy, at a modest charge.

~~~
BlueTemplar
Tensorflow is backed by Google, an advertising transnational corporation.

------
asveikau
> In 1990 when you said a program was 'open source', you meant that you could
> read the source code; the actual code the person had written to create the
> program.

Citation needed. I don't think people were saying "open source" in 1990.
FSF/GNU had the term "free software" for longer but they had to explain it on
every first use. (Probably still do to an extent.)

------
catalogia
> _In fact an article puts the abandonment rate of open source projects on
> Github at about 98% - meaning that there is no activity on 98% of projects
> after a year. This has coined a phrase - abandonware._

That's factually incorrect. The term "abandonware" dates back to the 90s (long
before github) and was originally used to describe software that was
predominantly proprietary. Virtually all proprietary software ever written has
become abandoned or will eventually become abandoned, but I guess that fact
doesn't really square with what the author wants to say.

------
arminiusreturns
I am not really responding to the article, but to the general concept of the
Cathedral and the Bazarr.

The main problem is this: in sufficiently complex programs, roughly associated
with LOC, there becomes a point where there are no longer enough eyes on
enough pieces of code.

Therefore, I propose that the future of FOSS in the Bazarr style is to focus
on reducing code complexity and increase readability as much as possible.

“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the
unessential.” - Bruce Lee

------
fargle
Cute title. But wow, this guy apparently does not live in the same universe
as, I think, the rest of us.

I hadn't read ESRs paper in a few years, but just reread it again now. This
author is definitely oversimplifying and mischaracterizing it. It's not right
to conflate "Cathedral" with "Closed-Source" and "Commercial", nor to
incorrectly imply that's what ESRs paper point was. Plenty of earlier Open
Source software, notably FSF software itself, is (or was) developed
"Cathedral" style and ESR definitely talks about that. I always read his paper
as kind of "GNU FSF" process vs. "Linux", both being Open Source (or Free to
please RMS). And I think history has proven his points rather nicely, IMHO.

But "Cathedral" and "Bazaar" are just two points on a spectrum anyway, and
it's mostly orthogonal to a "Free/Open" vs. "Closed/Commercial" spectrum.

Now to the rest of the paper, while couched in formal and civil language, the
author would have been much more succinct if he just came right out and said
"Open Source Software Sux!". Which is an odd point to make for an academic
having little experience writing either or any kind of _real_ software.

I can see he thinks that, but there's not much in the way of actual arguments,
other than opinions and cherry-picked sentences from ESR's paper, to make it
worth picking apart or disagreeing with.

So yup, I fully agree: Dr Mark Tarver thinks that "Open Source Sux because
Reasons".

Now then, I will just be getting back to the universe in which I live, where
Open Source software is the foundation of the internet and just about every
other piece of modern technology from doorbells to cars, including nearly all
proprietary commercial products too...

------
hitekker
> There's a larger group of not-so-harmless people than the givers who are
> driven by greed for free stuff and a sense of entitlement. We can call these
> the takers. Takers are generally abusive if their entitlement is challenged;
> because to criticise the open source model is to take away their
> intellectual candy and the result is a tantrum. Amongst this larger group
> are a smaller group of DRM crackers and pirates. In nearly all open source
> projects, they outnumber the givers. Michael 'Monty' Widenius, an open
> source advocate, acknowledges the problem.

> Help create a generation of takers that believed that all code should be
> open source and embraced open source as a religion. Online bullying of
> dissent began in forums. A large number of believers then traded 'code' for
> 'digitisable media' and the most active of those went in for DRM cracking
> and piracy.

Judging by the comments so far, I think he struck a nerve.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
You can definitely filter out the worst customers by raising prices, the
bottom of any market is usually a cesspit. I suspect the very top is as well
although I haven't any experience of that.

------
newnewpdro
Unfinished experiments that aspire(d) to be something relevant are more like
vaporware, not abandonware. I'd argue the vast majority of what's on github is
this or dirty hacks that never warranted any further development or
maintenance.

There's actually substantial value in access to such things. Rather than
repeating the experiments yourself, you can go see where they led others
without investing the time and energy to repeat the effort. If you find
something that mostly resembles what you would have made, can get along with
the license, and still wish to move forward - huzzah, a jump starting fork is
born.

Abandonware IMHO is more appropriately applied to examples like Google's ever
growing list of abandoned projects that actually had _users_ , where the world
noticed the abandonment of something useful.

~~~
zzo38computer
That is a good point. Sometimes the code is useful even if it is incomplete.
(I have sometimes done such things, taking parts of other programs; more
often, I write most of the code myself, but some of it will come from other
sources like that. As an example, I found the source code for a JPEG encoder,
and modified it to improve the compression and other things. There are many
other such cases too.)

------
fefe23
The facts as presented by this article do not match the facts I remember. I'm
an old fart and was actually alive and active writing software at that time.

The cathedral and the bazaar was not a book, it was an essay. They apparently
later turned it into a book but I know nobody who read the book. The essay, in
contrast, was read by everybody in the scene.

Here's how I remember it.

Open source has no specific meaning before esr claimed it. And after he
claimed it, crucially, open source did not mean you could not charge for the
software.

I practice almost no source code was released under non-liberal licenses, but
there are some notable exceptions. For example, Microsoft released the source
code of the Windows kernel for research use to universities. AFAIK that
technically means Windows is open source.

esr was not against releasing source code under non-liberal licenses. He was
just convinced those would not stand a chance against code released under
liberal licenses. Time has proven him right, I would say.

Also this article misses the point, I think. Open source was not meant to
define or enshrine a methodology. It was coined because at the time people
felt that the free software movement was holding itself back in the fight
against Microsoft (google "halloween documents" to get more insight into esr's
struggle against Microsoft) because it sounded like you could not make money
with it. Also because the GNU General Public License said if you make changes
to a piece of GPL code, the result must also be under the GPL. So in a sense
GPL actually did impede commercial exploitation of free software.

At the time many libertarians (like esr) felt that the market would solve this
if you just let it, and software is not the place to fight ideological wars
about the freedom of software.

I'm just paraphrasing the arguments here as I understood them. Personally I
come down on the pro-GPL side of the aisle.

~~~
perl4ever
Before personal computers, wasn't free/open software the default because there
wasn't a mass market for software? I think I've been told something like that
by someone of an older generation.

------
specialist
Cathedral & Bizarre has never made sense to me.

What do people think of Social Architecture, Pieter Hintjens' ideas for
building successful open source software?

Collective Code Construction Contract
[https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4/](https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4/)

[https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-
architecture...](https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-
architecture/details)

[http://hintjens.com/books](http://hintjens.com/books)

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

\--

Hintjens' worldview appeals to me.

I've done a bit of activism, with (very) modest success. A Design Patterns
book club I started 20 years ago continues today; we somehow stumbled on a
sustainable format.

Not having any successful OSS projects of my own (yet), I can't say if
Hintjens' ideas work. I hope to find out.

------
caiocaiocaio
I wonder how much of the software between me and that blog post is open
source?

------
padde
Some true points mixed in with a load of bullshit.

~~~
BlueTemplar
Yep, he's just torpedoing his own credibility with shit-nuggets like :

> What the world does not need is another buggy open source copy of Windows
> Media Player.

Is this supposed to refer to VLC ?!? (Admittedly that one is not in in the
current version of his "manifesto".)

\- Somehow using GitHub as an example that Darwinian competition doesn't work.

\- Retconning the term "abandonware"

\- The tired (and wrong) argument equating counterfeiting to theft. (No wonder
that he thinks that mindshare is unrelated to making money !)

> Instead [F(L)OSS] produced a graveyard of dead software; the largest sink of
> wasted human labour in history - bigger than even the Mao's Great Leap
> Forward or the Stalin's building of the White Sea Canal.

And after all of this, he has the gall to call F(L)OSS proponent "Zealots" !

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no
attention to the plank in your own eye?"

------
a3n
> Most open source is barely usable and empirical inspection of Github will
> show that to be true.

There is no barrier to entry on GitHub or similar repositories.

It's quite another thing to contribute to the Linux kernel, or gnu, or
similar, which are overwhelmingly excellent, and an essential part of running
the world as it's currently configured.

------
galaxyLogic
I've put some code I wrote up on GitHub. Why did I do it?

1\. As a learning experience, how does GitHub work?

2\. As advertisement for myself as software developer

3\. As a check on myself, is the software good enough for others to use. When
you do something publicly "on stage" it better be good. Not only good in terms
of "code quality" but in terms of "does it do something useful?".

So I think I've got some benefits from publishing my code as open source. Not
financially, like the corporations.

I think the world is still waiting for a better monetizing model for opens
source, as well as for component-software in general. As things go Cloud, I
think such a model will eventually if not soon emerge.

On the article, I found this to the point:

"The truth revealed that OpenSSL was seriously underfinanced with only one
full time operative working on a code base of hundreds of thousands of lines
of C."

~~~
r00fus
I've got another one:

4\. Breaking down that barrier of perfectionism that prevents you from
publishing or finding worth in your creations.

~~~
galaxyLogic
HackerNews is open source, right? We share our ideas free of charge here. I'm
not even aware of the copyright if any that applies to postings here. And we
do it for fun, not for profit. But does it a great book make? Does it even
make a magazine?

So I think the point of the article is that while Open Source has its uses, it
is not and as far as we can see never will be a wholesale replacement for
commercial software.

------
zzo38computer
"However the problem is that the open source user may not stumble on this
magical fraction and the invisible iceberg of buggy, ill-conceived open source
lies submerged ... open source uses massive amounts of user time trawling
through defunct and buggy applications and posting to forums ..." Regardless
of what you are looking for (open source computer programs, closed source
computer programs, television shows, books, etc) some won't be so good, or
might be difference what you need for your use, and so they have reviews about
such thing.

"An awful lot of popular open source is inferior reverse-engineered copies of
existing commercial software (Gimp, OpenOffice etc)." Is Gimp a reverse-
engineered copy of existing software? Just because it is similar to some
proprietary software does not necessarily mean that it is a "reverse-
engineered copy" of it. OpenOffice presumably involves the reverse-engineered
formats of Microsoft Office, although now there is LibreOffice. Both Microsoft
Office and LibreOffice each have some features the other lacks. What is
"inferior" may also depend on your opinion, because in some cases it isn't so
clear, and in some cases it may be inferior in some ways but superior in
others.

"If open source programmers do innovate and their innovation is good then its
just as likely to be swept away from them by the corporations who have the
capital to exploit it." In my experience that doesn't always happen. Many
features first implemented in GNU/Linux systems are things that they did not
implement similar features in Windows until much later.

"... the Linux desktop still lags behind Windows and the interface looks stuck
in the 90s." Actually, I think both in Linux and Windows many programs try to
be too fancy, but in Linux I can change the window manager and all of that
stuff easily and still works. I uninstalled the desktop environment, and I
think it works much better than Windows ever did, actually.

"Good software is properly documented, does not break and does not require
hand-holding to use it." True, but that isn't the issue; the issue is
customizing it.

Love of money is the root of all evil.

------
voidhorse
I’m going to play devil’s advocate and suggest this essay is worth an open-
minded read to anyone working in the software industry. The vast majority of
comments that take issue with it in this thread thus far are nitpicks about
minor points, and almost none address the essential thrusts of Tarver’s
argument, all of which are actually quite cogent.

As he notes, it’s still the case today that the vast majority of successful
open source projects are only those coming out of mega corporations that
actually pay tons of smart engineers to spend time on them (fb, google, uber,
et al). It happens every now and then, but it’s quite rare that some solitary
programmer or duo whip up an os library or product that snags as much of the
market as an os project managed by one of the big dogs.

Burnout on the part of solitary maintainers of non-corporate backed os
projects is also quite a real and problematic issue.

The adoption of the MIT license, I’d wager, borders on a cultic practice these
days and is rarely the outcome of long deliberation on the appropriate license
selection on the part of a project maintainer (excluding of course the big
companies, whom are incredibly savy and smart about this because they have
lawyers).

Os projects also have, generally speaking, horrible support. If an os library
isn’t small enough or written in such a way that I can read the source and
understand it in about a day and a half, maximum, I won’t use it. The adoption
of certain libraries also trends toward tribal practice and ritualistic
behavior. People select librires based on their popularity or a personal
incentive (these two motivations merge, since a thing’s being popular stirs a
personal incentive to learn it in order to be more valuable on the market, see
react et al.) more oft than they do based on a thorough technical assessment.

All in all, os has benefited massive corporations much more than it has
benefited solo programmers or users. Tbh, I would not be surprised if a world
w/o open source actually would have given us more diversity in the tech
market—spawning several boutiques of software houses churning out small-scale
bespoke, but closed source, tech instead of massive corps who not only use os
as a “good grace” but also as a tool to create yet another relation of
dependency between themselves and users or other companies—i.e. gain more
power.

OS’s one invoiable benefit is that it has significantly liberated the auto-
didact—its a huge boon for those that can’t learn through other channels...but
even this benefit comes with wrinkles. One can’t know which of the practices
one sees in os code are instances of good or bad technique without having
external knowledge about programming techniques, which cannot come from code
reading alone (unless you think a pattern’s frequency equates to it being a
good practice, arguably a mistake in most cases).

------
wazoox
This guy is so wrong. Truth is that innumerable closed source programs are
abandoned (and that's actually what "abandonware" stands for). However,
contrary to open-source, they're nowhere to be seen.

When you're depending upon some piece of closed source abandonware, you're
without recourse. If by any chance, you'd be depending upon an abandoned open-
source software, most probably it has been abandoned because there are better
alternatives; or in case there aren't, you're still free to salvage it from
oblivion.

The whole article reeks of bad faith.

------
galaxyLogic
See also: [http://marktarver.com/free-as-in-do-as-your-
told.html](http://marktarver.com/free-as-in-do-as-your-told.html)

------
comex
> There's a larger group of not-so-harmless people than the givers who are
> driven by greed for free stuff and a sense of entitlement. We can call these
> the takers. Takers are generally abusive if their entitlement is challenged;
> because to criticise the open source model is to take away their
> intellectual candy and the result is a tantrum. Amongst this larger group
> are a smaller group of DRM crackers and pirates. In nearly all open source
> projects, they outnumber the givers.

What an absurd dichotomy. Even if you work full time on open source, you
probably can't be a major contributor to more than a handful of large
projects, at most; many people specialize in just one. But you probably _use_
dozens to hundreds of open source programs. So for any project with a modicum
of popularity, _of course_ the number of people who use the software without
contributing dwarfs the number of contributors. That would be true even if
_everyone_ worked full time on open source.

Admittedly, the OP's definition of "takers" is not just "people who use
without contributing", but tacks on some ad hominem insults to supposedly
qualify it. The result has very little resemblance to reality. Sure, there
will always be some people who become truly abusive if a project makes a
change they don't like. But they're definitely a minority. Most people, facing
such a situation, don't speak up at all; they might be annoyed, but they keep
it to themselves. Others do speak up, but know how to be polite about it.
Perhaps the OP assumes that people should not voice negative opinions at all,
if they're not contributing to a given project. I disagree. A good default
assumption is that open source maintainers are open to _polite_ and _well-
reasoned_ negative feedback. A maintainer can always forbid such feedback in
official project forums if they so choose; if they do, users should respect
it, but it's is not a very gracious move.

And what the heck do DRM cracking and piracy have to do with anything? In my
experience, those people – whom I respect – form communities which are
oriented around piracy, and pretty separate from the open source world. In
part this is because the nature of the work they do is different; reverse
engineering is different from software development, and many pirates do
neither of those, but just use existing tools to distribute pirated copies of
whatever type of media they're fans of (e.g. anime). I'd say they're also more
likely (compared to programmers as a whole) to use cracked proprietary
software instead of open source. Of course, this is a massive
overgeneralization, but the point is that bringing them up makes no sense.

------
zakki
He should’ve counted the impacts of the open source software instead of the
number of it. Does he think Apache web server with million or billions usage
the same as one random open source software he found on GitHub and less than
hundreds usage? Further, If he counts all of OSS on github and or sourceforge,
he should’ve counted all crappy and abandoned closed software buried in any
corporate office.

------
peterwwillis
Old, large tapestries were often gigantic, complex, expensive, time-consuming,
exquisitely intricate carpets that hung on walls. They could take from years
to decades to complete, and consume fortunes. One of their primary functions
was to show off how wealthy or important you were.

Now that we have machines that can do weaving and sew patterns automatically,
it's possible to create a tapestry without as much time and expense. But until
recent times it was time-consuming, laborious, difficult, and expensive.

One day we'll have machines to write code for us in minutes that would have
taken weeks or months for humans, and we won't need to pay people to slave
over keyboards to churn out pithy little programs and litter source code
repositories all over the internet. We won't have to whine about the unkept
documentation, or use complex systems that feed random data into test
harnesses just to find the bugs that we accidentally put into the code. One
day programmers will be obsolete.

Until the new machines come around to replace us, our software tapestries are
going to remain really frigging difficult to make. So, yes, without proper
financing, most of them will probably be abandoned.

What I'm wondering is: how many of the new machines already exist, but we
can't use them because they're proprietary or patented?

~~~
itronitron
well, there are tools for auto-generating code from schema files but no
machines yet for creating whole applications. Based on my experience, I think
the last frontier will be mapping the user-possibility-workflow space to
action-consequence-application-state space.

------
empath75
He wrote this essay as if people haven’t made billions and billions of dollars
from open source software.

~~~
galaxyLogic
I think he covers that a bit discussing Red Hat and other OS successes, and
goes on to say "There's a larger group of not-so-harmless people than the
givers who are driven by greed for free stuff and a sense of entitlement"

------
okareaman
It's interesting to ponder the points made in this essay with the recent
discussion about "FUSE for macOS is no longer open source"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21759967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21759967)

The FUSE situation would seem to be a key piece of evidence supporting Dr Mark
Tarver's main thesis that writing open source generally doesn't pay or mostly
pays corporations who are in a better position to monetize the value in the
software. His linked essay at the bottom about Stallman states the Stallman
offers no economic model that would pay a programmer for their labor and
states that may be because he has no business experience.

------
EncryptEntropy
ESR is the truth while this shill’s critique of the open source model is both
incorrect and a waste of time.

------
MTarver
I skimmed these responses, I'd say that most of them are the result of not
reading the material in the essay or nit-picking or ad hominem remarks. I
really tried to find something of real worth.

'His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or
unusable." When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring
to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc.
They're not referring to random crap on Github.

I'm afraid this in an attempt to redefine open source and is an example of the
'isolated points fallacy' covered in the essay. Open source includes
everything with an open source license. To say OS is successful by defining
all projects that do not succeed as not part of OS is simply to coin a
tautology.

'Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better? If
we can count the sea of abandonware on Github, then we get to count the
mountain of "interesting" code that remains internal to large companies, or
worse, the stuff that actually got released on unsuspecting customers.'

Again covered in the essay

'Proprietary software vendors typically make money by producing software that
people want to use. This is a strong incentive to make it more usable. (It
doesn’t always work: for example, Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe software
sometimes becomes worse but remains dominant through network effects. But it
works most of the time.)

With volunteer projects, though, any incentive is much weaker. The number of
users rarely makes any financial difference to developers, and with freely
redistributable software, it’s near-impossible to count users anyway. There
are other incentives — impressing future employers, or getting your software
included in a popular OS — but they’re rather oblique.'

What an absurd dichotomy. Even if you work full time on open source, you
probably can't be a major contributor to more than a handful of large
projects, at most; many people specialize in just one. But you probably use
dozens to hundreds of open source programs. So for any project with a modicum
of popularity, of course the number of people who use the software without
contributing dwarfs the number of contributors. That would be true even if
everyone worked full time on open source.

A giver is a person who gives as much or more than he takes. A taker is one
who takes more than he gives. Define it in relation to open source as a whole
and the dichotomy is valid. There are users and corporations who take far more
from OS collectively than they give back. Is this hard to grasp?

'The vast majority of comments that take issue with it in this thread thus far
are nitpicks about minor points, and almost none address the essential thrusts
of Tarver’s argument, all of which are actually quite cogent.'

That's basically right and that's why after 20 years the OS movement is still
stuck where ESR left it.

