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The Cathedral and the Bizarre

marktarver.com

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Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#11

Post by TheCondor »

xorand wrote: post #2

>...an article puts the abandonment rate of open source projects on Github at about 98% - meaning that there is no activity on 98% of projects after a year [0]. This has coined a phrase - abandonware. I'm not a programmer, I'm a researcher. Let me tell you a fact: about 100% of research articles are not updated. Somehow the link [0] cited in the article makes an indirect similar point, but what's wrong with programs…

The concept does need some qualification. “Small software” can probably become “done.” Grep, as an example, is done. Frameworks, libraries, and applications all have a steering wheel requirement of support.

I’d suggest that a fair amount of github open source is resume padding, or at least an attempt at it rather than “scratching a developer’s itch” which the original ESR paper mentioned as a reason.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#12

Post by zwkrt »

traverseda wrote: post #6

I have like 30 projects on github, I don't expect any of them to really go anywhere, it's just where I put stuff when I'm playing with a new concept. There are ~3 projects that I would have actually have liked to go somewhere, real projects not toys, that I have abandoned. So that "98% of projects" statistic is fair, but I think those numbers would be looking a lot better if you accounted for the fact that github is…

It seems like a silly metric. Almost all code gets abandoned, and at an alarming rate. Unless you happened to build a popular database or an operating system component, it’s likely that your code is gone in 10 years. And if not, your code is likely the future bane of some developer who despises maintaining it since it is such a bear to update to their unforeseeable requirements.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#13

Post by dwohnitmok »

It is perhaps useful to understand where the author is coming from.

The author is very critical of open source on the whole. He has a series of articles detailing criticisms of open source software.

http://marktarver.com/problems.html (The Problems of Open Source) http://marktarver.com/open.html (In Praise of Closed Source)

He is the inventor of the Qi (later Shen) language (essentially a Lisp dialect with a configurable type system). He experimented with taking it open source. He was very underwhelmed by the results and has made later revisions closed source again. In particular as far as I can tell he felt he was losing creative control of the project and getting little to nothing back for it in terms of contributions and features (and in general very unimpressed with people's reaction to the language and the wider programming community's capability of understanding the language).

He has also had at least one argument on Reddit about this (see the post by Mark_Tarver here https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/57h33q/arguing...).

This is one article in a long series of events and thoughts for him that have played out over the past decade.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#14

Post by [deleted] »

fefe23 wrote: post #7

The facts as presented by this article do not match the facts I remember. I'm an old fart and was actually alive and active writing software at that time. The cathedral and the bazaar was not a book, it was an essay. They apparently later turned it into a book but I know nobody who read the book. The essay, in contrast, was read by everybody in the scene. Here's how I remember it. Open source has no specific meaning…

[deleted]

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#15

Post by sedatk »

xorand wrote: post #2

>...an article puts the abandonment rate of open source projects on Github at about 98% - meaning that there is no activity on 98% of projects after a year [0]. This has coined a phrase - abandonware. I'm not a programmer, I'm a researcher. Let me tell you a fact: about 100% of research articles are not updated. Somehow the link [0] cited in the article makes an indirect similar point, but what's wrong with programs…

Are there any numbers on closed source projects to compare this with? Say, if closed source projects have a 99% abandonment rate, what do these numbers tell us?

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#16

Post by xorand »

haecceity wrote: post #10
xorand wrote: post #2

>...an article puts the abandonment rate of open source projects on Github at about 98% - meaning that there is no activity on 98% of projects after a year [0]. This has coined a phrase - abandonware. I'm not a programmer, I'm a researcher. Let me tell you a fact: about 100% of research articles are not updated. Somehow the link [0] cited in the article makes an indirect similar point, but what's wrong with programs…

I thought proofs and programs were the same thing

Constructive proofs are equivalent to programs. But until somebody writes the program, there are always details, context, style, etc which make a proof understandable by a human but not a program. A program is more rigorous than a proof, in this sense.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#17

Post by sdenton4 »

"No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative software ought to play by a different set of rules."

Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a movie.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#18

Post by sildur »

sdenton4 wrote: post #17

"No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative software ought to play by a different set of rules." Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a movie.

A novel also is produced by a “herd”. There are a lot of people involved. People that make suggestions, corrections, the editor... It’s not a single person effort.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#19

Post by Koshkin »

sdenton4 wrote: post #17

"No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative software ought to play by a different set of rules." Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a movie.

Well, to be fair, a textbook is not a theorem or an enjoyable novel... Also, a movie is not made by a “herd” (unless one thinks of a company as a herd.) Wikipedia would be a better example.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#20

Post by catalogia »

> In fact an article puts the abandonment rate of open source projects on Github at about 98% - meaning that there is no activity on 98% of projects after a year. This has coined a phrase - abandonware.

That's factually incorrect. The term "abandonware" dates back to the 90s (long before github) and was originally used to describe software that was predominantly proprietary. Virtually all proprietary software ever written has become abandoned or will eventually become abandoned, but I guess that fact doesn't really square with what the author wants to say.

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