Businesses die. Cathedrals don't. IBM is 114 years old. Microsoft is 50. Google is 27. Disney is 101. Nintendo is 136 (they'll outlive Steam and the next nuclear war at this rate). The COBOL running banks is 65 years old. Windows NT architecture is 32. The platforms become infrastructure, too embedded to replace.
How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained? Go through GitHub's trending repos from 2015. Most are abandoned. The successes transform - GitLab, Linux, Kubernetes, more Cathedral than Bazaar.
> How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained?
Uhh, all the big ones in common use? GNU’s massive portfolio of software, Linux, multiple BSDs, Apache, Firefox, BusyBox, PHP, Perl, the many lineages of StarOffice, LaTeX, Debian, vim, fish, tmux, I mean this barely scratches the surface. Are you kidding me?
How many startups have failed over the last decade? I would argue that the norm is for any project to eventually cease. Only useful things with an active community (whether that community is for-profit or not) tend to last, until they are no longer valued enough to maintain. This goes for things in the physical world just as it does for software.
Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib and GCC, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.
> Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.
Did BSD defeat Linux? No. Which BSD is even the right one? BSD's biggest success is living on as the foundation of Apple's Cathedral in XNU, and PlayStation's Cathedral in the PS4 and PS5.
Did Linux stay a bazaar vendor? No - 90% of code has been corporate contributed since 2004. Less than 3% of the Linux Foundation budget goes towards kernel development. Linux is a Cathedral, by every definition, and only exists today because Cathedrals invest in it for collective benefit. It's a Cathedral, run as a Cathedral joint venture, to be abandoned if a better thing for the investing Cathedrals ever came along.
GCC? Being clobbered by Clang. Less relevant every year. Same with GNU coreutils, slowly getting killed by uutils.
Firefox? Firefox only still exists because a Cathedral called Google funds it.
LibreOffice, Apache, PHP, Blender? Professional foundations that get very picky about who is allowed to contribute what. They aren't amateurs and they all depend on Cathedral funding. Blender only got good when it started collecting checks from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Adobe. Blender is a Cathedral funded by Cathedrals.
Businesses die. Cathedrals don't. IBM is 114 years old. Microsoft is 50. Google is 27. Disney is 101. Nintendo is 136 (they'll outlive Steam and the next nuclear war at this rate). The COBOL running banks is 65 years old. Windows NT architecture is 32. The platforms become infrastructure, too embedded to replace.
How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained? Go through GitHub's trending repos from 2015. Most are abandoned. The successes transform - GitLab, Linux, Kubernetes, more Cathedral than Bazaar.
> How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained?
Uhh, all the big ones in common use? GNU’s massive portfolio of software, Linux, multiple BSDs, Apache, Firefox, BusyBox, PHP, Perl, the many lineages of StarOffice, LaTeX, Debian, vim, fish, tmux, I mean this barely scratches the surface. Are you kidding me?
How many startups have failed over the last decade? I would argue that the norm is for any project to eventually cease. Only useful things with an active community (whether that community is for-profit or not) tend to last, until they are no longer valued enough to maintain. This goes for things in the physical world just as it does for software.
Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib and GCC, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.
> Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.
Did BSD defeat Linux? No. Which BSD is even the right one? BSD's biggest success is living on as the foundation of Apple's Cathedral in XNU, and PlayStation's Cathedral in the PS4 and PS5.
Did Linux stay a bazaar vendor? No - 90% of code has been corporate contributed since 2004. Less than 3% of the Linux Foundation budget goes towards kernel development. Linux is a Cathedral, by every definition, and only exists today because Cathedrals invest in it for collective benefit. It's a Cathedral, run as a Cathedral joint venture, to be abandoned if a better thing for the investing Cathedrals ever came along.
GCC? Being clobbered by Clang. Less relevant every year. Same with GNU coreutils, slowly getting killed by uutils.
Firefox? Firefox only still exists because a Cathedral called Google funds it.
LibreOffice, Apache, PHP, Blender? Professional foundations that get very picky about who is allowed to contribute what. They aren't amateurs and they all depend on Cathedral funding. Blender only got good when it started collecting checks from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Adobe. Blender is a Cathedral funded by Cathedrals.
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I we're doing bad analogies my mom's open source duck recipe has been around for hundreds of years.