Comment by gjsman-1000

Comment by gjsman-1000 5 hours ago

If you want a real blackpill (I think this is the right word), consider the famous Cathedral and the Bazaar.

I recently had a realization: I can name Cathedrals, that are 800 years old, and still standing. I can't name a single Bazaar stall more than 50 years old around any Cathedral that's still standing. The Cathedral's builders no doubt bought countless stone and food from the Bazaar, making the Bazaar very useful for building Cathedrals with, but the Bazaar was historically ephemeral.

The very title of the essay predicts failure. The very metaphor for the philosophy was broken from the start. Or, in a twisted accidentally correct way, it was the perfect metaphor for how open-source ends up as Cathedral supplies.

nerdsniper 4 hours ago

There are definitely bazaars which have a very old history. Being that the word "bazaar" has middle-eastern origins it feels appropriate to highlight middle eastern bazaars. Al-Madina Souq in Aleppo is one such bazaar with quite a few shops/stalls/"souqs" dating back to the 1300's or 1400's, such as Khan al-Qadi (est. 1450). Khan el-Khalili in Cairo has its economic marketplace origins rooted in the 1100's-1300's.

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gjsman-1000 4 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.

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- nerdsniper 4 hours ago
  
  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)
  
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- PaulDavisThe1st 4 hours ago
  
  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.
  
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- bigstrat2003 4 hours ago
  
  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.
  
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iamnothere 3 hours ago

Not to mention the large number of ancient marketplaces that still exist (in active use) all over the world, some of which are UNESCO world heritage sites.
This type of informal market likely outnumbers cathedrals, especially if you count the ones that evolved into tourist markets, high streets, malls, and central business districts.

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spookie 4 hours ago

I fail to see the link, businesses come and go. Their software dies with them.

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gjsman-1000 4 hours ago

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.

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- dandellion an hour ago
  
  I we're doing bad analogies my mom's open source duck recipe has been around for hundreds of years.
  
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- mariusor 4 hours ago
  
  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.
  
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  gjsman-1000 4 hours ago
  
  > 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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- iamnothere 4 hours ago
  
  > 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.
  
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api 4 hours ago

The title also correctly describes the relationship between FOSS and cloud SaaS. FOSS is the bone yard and parts catalog that devs go to when building closed platforms to lock in users. It largely exists today to be free labor for SaaS and training data for AI.

I'm not there yet, but I am perilously close to tipping over into believing that making open source software today is actually doing harm by giving more free labor to an exploitative ecosystem. Instead you should charge for your software and try to build an ecosystem where the customer is the customer and not the product.

I stress today because this was not true pre-SaaS or pre-mobile. FOSS was indeed liberating in the PC and early web eras.

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