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Comment by nickff

17 hours ago

Isn't Carmack just employing the 'Cathedral' type of 'Open Source'?

The “cathedral” model refers to closed-source development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...

  • Appending ‘development’ seems like a significant departure from ‘vanilla’ “Open Source” to me, and wouldn’t all development be ‘closed-source’ at least between commits, if not between pull requests?

    • See https://opensource.org/about/history-of-the-open-source-init... under ‘Coining “Open Source”’:

      The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.”

      From the beginning it was about promoting the model of developing software in an open community. The licensing is a means to that, but the motivating idea is to have open-source development.

      And Netscape’s release of the source code, what lead to Mozilla, was prompted by the “bazaar” ideas presented by RMS.

      5 replies →

  • > In closed-source software development, the programmers are often spending a lot of time dealing with and creating bug reports, as well as handling feature requests. This time is spent on creating and prioritizing further development plans. This leads to part of the development team spending a lot of time on these issues, and not on the actual development.

    So, in closed source you work on bug reports and feature requests. In open source you work on development. But it's the closed source people working on building a cathedral.

    I understand what they're driving at, but this is still the stupidest description of the analogy that I've ever seen.