Comment by gjsman-1000
9 hours ago
Name a single bazaar vendor that's still going more than 50 years in any of them. The bazaar as an institution remains, as it does today, but there's no permanence with a bazaar, just as open-source will never have a permanent victory without becoming a cathedral. Bazaars persist through constant replacement, churn, not victory.
Windows NT will be with us longer than systemd and flatpak.
No I meant there are individual shops inside the bazaars that are still going under the same brand name for hundreds of years. The El-Fishawy Cafe inside Cairo's Khan el-Khalili bazaar has been operating under the same name since the 1700's[0]. Bakdash ice cream parlor inside Damacus' Al-Hamidiyah Souq was established in 1895.
For me, walking through an old Souq gives me a similar feeling of awe / mortality / insignificance as viewing a cathedral or looking from the Colorado ranch land up to the Rocky Mountains.
Also some cathedrals have remained "Catholic" since their raising, but there are a lot that have changed from Christian to Islamic to Protestant ... both the cathedral and the bazaar's physical buildings are still present from the same era and both are used for their original purpose (marketplace or worship). And both have delibly shaped their regions by being engines of culture, innovation, and power.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El-Fishawy_Café
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakdash_(ice_cream_parlor)
Windows NT is younger than Unix. I'd say the smart money is on the Unix-derived line of operating systems outliving Windows NT by a considerable amount.
However ... the domain of operating systems is subject to weird constraints, and so it's not really appropriate to make some of the observations one might make in other domains. Nevertheless, I thought the point was that we want things to improve via replacement (a "bazaar" model), rather than stand for all time. We don't actually want technology "cathedrals" at all, even if we do appreciate architectural ones.
Cathedrals change organizations too. You can't compare the longevity of a physical edifice (a cathedral) to an individual or organization (a bazaar vendor). They are different classes of things.