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The Cathedral and the Bizarre

marktarver.com

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Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#91

Post by tonyedgecombe »

hitekker wrote: post #30

> There's a larger group of not-so-harmless people than the givers who are driven by greed for free stuff and a sense of entitlement. We can call these the takers. Takers are generally abusive if their entitlement is challenged; because to criticise the open source model is to take away their intellectual candy and the result is a tantrum. Amongst this larger group are a smaller group of DRM crackers and pirates. In…

You can definitely filter out the worst customers by raising prices, the bottom of any market is usually a cesspit. I suspect the very top is as well although I haven't any experience of that.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#92

Post by colin_mccabe »

The harsh reality is that most software, no matter whether it's open source or closed, never makes it big. Take a stroll through an app store on iPhone-- or better yet, on Android! just to see how many apps there. You'll find hundreds of flashlight apps, calendar apps, and so on. Buggy, abandoned software is hardly unique to open source.

Then there is the argument that "open source isn't innovative." This seems like a really tired argument. Most software of any kind can be painted as just a mere modification or variation on something that someone once wrote in the past. We've had almost a century of software, after all. I also like the links to late-90s and 2000-era websites saying that Linux will never be innovative. The only way this could be better is if we could create a deep fake of Steve Ballmer saying it onstage.

But wait! Tensorflow is open source, so we can't use that, clearly. Financial deficiency disease and all. Luckily, I'm willing to make a special enterprise edition for this guy, at a modest charge.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#93

Post by DonHopkins »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37
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.

The Bible has something like 40 authors. It would probably be classified as a "work of art of importance", even if you don't classify it as anything more than that.

First they said there was just one God, and the Bible contains "His" words. Then it turned out there were actually three, and one of them is edible and tastes just like crackers and wine. Now you're telling me there are 40? JFC, get your story straight, Christians!

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#94

Post by saagarjha »

bsder wrote: post #61
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…

> 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. Then why put it there? git works fine without github. And by putting your projects on github all you did was add to the baseline white noise that people have to filter through.

Where should I put it? Or are you suggesting not sharing it at all?

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#95

Post by saagarjha »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #40
thaumasiotes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naked Came the Stranger was written, not just produced, by a herd, to massive success. (It was intended to fail, and the herd writing was an element of that intention, but none of that stopped it from experiencing massive success.)

See also: Atlanta Nights , another sort of "successful failure" group-written project meant to demonstrate that an alleged "publisher" was really a vanity press with no actual standards or editorial process. You can now buy the book via various links from the official website of the "author" [1], but in case you're in need of a few giggles right this minute , the submitted manuscript was also released by one of the c…

Is that…all? It says 71,503 words at the top but I only see a hundred…

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#96

Post by okareaman »

It's interesting to ponder the points made in this essay with the recent discussion about "FUSE for macOS is no longer open source" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21759967

The FUSE situation would seem to be a key piece of evidence supporting Dr Mark Tarver's main thesis that writing open source generally doesn't pay or mostly pays corporations who are in a better position to monetize the value in the software. His linked essay at the bottom about Stallman states the Stallman offers no economic model that would pay a programmer for their labor and states that may be because he has no business experience.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#97

Post by burntoutfire »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #57
ohazi wrote: post #41

It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable." When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github. The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterpart…

> most open source code is poor or unusable Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better? If we can count the sea of abandonware on Github, then we get to count the mountain of "interesting" code that remains internal to large companies, or worse, the stuff that actually got released on unsuspecting customers.

Closed-source crap is better because it's not available to the world, so millions of developers don't waste time exploring it and finding out that it's unusable.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#98

Post by kwhitefoot »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #57
ohazi wrote: post #41

It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable." When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github. The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterpart…

> most open source code is poor or unusable Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better? If we can count the sea of abandonware on Github, then we get to count the mountain of "interesting" code that remains internal to large companies, or worse, the stuff that actually got released on unsuspecting customers.

> Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better?

As many (most?) of us on HN are in some sense or another professional programmers I would think that would be an easy question to answer.

In my opinion the vast bulk of closed source code suffers from exactly the same constraints.

And most definitely there are vast quantities of quite execrable code in closed source programs. I've seen plenty and written some.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#99

Post by kwhitefoot »

zzo38computer wrote: post #72
ohazi wrote: post #41

It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable." When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github. The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterpart…

Those things I agree with it. The good open-source programs mostly are better than other programs in these ways. Yes there will be many badly written programs (I think someone said that 90% of anything will be not very good), but there is good stuff too. I think it may be the case even with the closed sources, but in that case they are unavailable so we will not have any statistics about it.

> 90% of anything will be not very good),

Theodore Sturgeon is usually credited with it but he was a little less polite and rather more definite, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#100

Post by kwhitefoot »

drongoking wrote: post #60
iudqnolq wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, he makes a weak argument by analogy > This lesser-known fact is masked by the isolated points fallacy. The isolated points fallacy consists in taking the high scoring points on a graph and plotting your line on the basis of them. Hence open source champions wheel out the standard examples of success - Open Office, Wordpress and Red Hat Linux (we'll look at why some of these have succeeded later)…

I don't buy his argument and I think he's confused. Lots of people have released code on github (as have I) so that other people can use it. Lots of it isn't used, so it looks abandoned. Maybe it is. So what? Why is that considered a failure of Open Source? I think he's applying closed source's rules. A closed source project is a failure if no one uses (ie, buys) it, since it represents a development cost that wasn't…

> A closed source project is a failure if no one uses (ie, buys) it,

I don't think this is true. The vast majority of closed source programs are created in house for in house use. No one is ever offered it publicly so no one buys it either.

It's hard for people to see the scale though because there is usually no central repository.

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