← Back to context

Comment by layer8

20 hours ago

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

9 comments

layer8

Reply
nickff  20 hours ago

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?

  • layer8  20 hours ago

    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.

    • throwaway17_17  13 hours ago

      I think you have confused RMS (Richard Stallman) and ESR (Eric S. Raymond). It was ESR that coined and popularized the cathedral and bazaar development analogy and terminology. It was also ESR who was at the conference your comment is discussing. RMS is “free software”, copyleft, and GNU. ESR is “open source” and the author of ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.

      Of course, I could have misunderstood your comment, if so, mea culpa and feel free to ignore.

da_chicken  19 hours ago

> 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.