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Comment by sethev

9 hours ago

As you point out in your linked comment, the original essay captured the zeitgeist of the time. It also influenced and inspired many people. From that perspective, it's hard for me to agree that it was bad. However, I don't think the content was original at the time (perhaps that's what you mean by bad?) - in the sense that ESR wasn't out ahead of people blazing some new trail and it also didn't hold up very well factually.

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sethev

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Taniwha  9 hours ago

Yeah, it's worth remembering that at the time a compiler cost $10k+, an OS $1000s/year - you couldn't work on OS or compiler work unless you worked for a big hardware company - a whole lot of interesting work was locked away from most programmers

  • jaredklewis  9 hours ago

    Wasn’t Cathedral and the Bazaar originally published in 1999? Who was paying thousands of dollars a year for an OS in 199? And I think GCC was already widespread by then, no?

    I didn’t start programming until a few years later, but for sure by 2002, it seemed to me a given that compilers were free. It was my impression that stuff like Borland was niche and that serious stuff like Java and C were free.

    Not saying you are wrong, just your comment surprised me. Maybe I have a revisionist memory or maybe those intervening 3 years were quite transformational in the industry.

    • tptacek  9 hours ago

      The firm I was at in 1997 was shipping commercial software with GCC. There were expensive compilers, but you weren't required to use them. For Windows builds, I think we were Borland C++, which was hundreds of dollars. Sun had a pretty expensive compiler for Solaris that I remember using for hunting down memory leaks.

    • LevGoldstein  8 hours ago

      I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k.

      Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.

    • Taniwha  4 hours ago

      Yes but Cathedral and the Bazaar was telling us that the world had changed, gcc was free, linux was a thing etc, mainframes (where compilers cost $10k and you (mostly) couldn't bring your own OS) were being replaced by workstations etc.

      Commercial access to Unix source was still many thousands of dollars, the whole SCO debacle was an attempt to stop free OSs from being a thing

      Many of us who had grown up from the mainframe era wanted to write compilers, work on OS's etc etc it was a hard thing to do (esp. outside the US) before the late 80s, cheap commodity hardware let a thousand flowers bloom

    • duskwuff  7 hours ago

      2002 was before the tipping point, IMO. Open-source software existed, but wasn't always taken seriously. Linux was still widely perceived as being a hobbyist OS unsuitable for "real" applications. A lot of the Internet still ran on Windows and commercial UNIX servers.

      3 replies →

    • queenkjuul  7 hours ago

      Apple was giving away a C compiler by 1999 afaik, GCC was well established (but going through the egcs drama?). Visual Studio/Visual C++ didn't get a free version until 2005 though.

      But yeah imo you're closer to right than not, though Microsoft licenses were still fairly expensive.

  • sethev  9 hours ago

    Yes, that is the context in which I first read it (likely around 1999 when it appeared on slashdot), as a senior in high school with no access to the tools used by most professional programmers at the time.

tptacek  9 hours ago

It was certainly influential. It's just bad on its own merits.

  • bawolff  8 hours ago

    I guess it depends on what you think the goal of the essay was. I always felt like the primary goal was to inspire people and a lot of the software engineering parts were more framing. To me it reads as a manifesto disguised as a software engineering essay.

    If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.