Comment by ghaff
2 years ago
The main criticism (IMO) isn't really the work itself but how it's handed down as wisdom. It wasn't really cathedral==proprietary and bazaar==open source. In fact it was about cathedral vs. bazaar in open source software and that story is more complicated and comes down to "It depends." There are certainly open source projects that have more of a cathedral aspect whether because of benevolent dictator model or, more recently, a strong commercially-oriented foundation. But there are also areas that look more like a bazaar which have some advantages with respect to innovation but can be... messy.
ESR is on record stating that the original focus of 'cathederal' was on GCC and Emacs, the terminology was applicable to proprietary software and top-down corporate cultures.
Yeah I never felt proprietary was the cathedral, more like GNU was the target there.
Yeah, it's weird how this anti-GNU piece became interpreted as a pro-Open Source piece.
The main thing I learnt from ESR was that you can, actually, do worse than Crazy Uncle Stallman.
But we got "Everyone Loves Eric Raymond", which made me feel less like the odd one out!
ESR got pretty nutty after 9/11. Or maybe he was always nutty and I wasn't paying attention.
1 reply →
At least GCC. But proprietary vs. open was the common understanding.
I'm probably mistating my "never felt" earlier. At the time it was the common assumption for those on slashdot (incl me) who had heard all the soundbites but not actually read it. It was only a bit later I realised it was about contrasting styles of running floss projects.
Understandable though, by the time it came out, the battle lines had shifted from Linux vs GNU to free/open vs proprietary anyway.