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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#121

Post by MatthewPhillips »

jballanc wrote: post #113
anu_gupta wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that a lot of people (myself included) think that Snow Leopard is a better OS than both Lion and Mountain Lion.

I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. If you are trying to build something that nobody is asking for, you can't beat the cathedral model! ;-) I will tell you, though, that Snow Leopard missed its ship date by 8 months (of…

The majority wanted to have scrolling inverted?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#122

Post by michaelt »

lmm wrote: post #20
norswap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doesn't change the fact that it's terrible and that better alternative exist (for instance, CMake), thereby making it yet another cruft from the past.

The bazaar is perfectly capable of adopting improvements that prove themselves, and eliminating cruft from the past, if the cost is worth it . See the recent systemd fuss. If CMake really is better then eventually all important projects will shift over to it, and distributions will stop installing autoconf by default, or eventually at all. The fact that this hasn't happened already tells us that the practical differe…

  The fact that this hasn't happened already tells us that 
  the practical difference isn't big enough to justify 
  expending a lot of effort on switching.
Are you arguing that it can't be a good idea, because if it was a good idea it would already have been done?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#123

Post by nandemo »

__alexs wrote: post #90
davidw wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you talk about a few current "Cathedrals" and how they're different from "Bazaars", that might help the discussion too. The only example that jumps out at me is the original Unix, and I think you'll agree that comparing software from 30 years ago that does vastly less than ... pretty much anything out there these days is not an entirely fair, nor useful comparison.

I agree with phkamp that it is weird that you can't think of any. Android is the most original-UNIX-like in it's development but I imagine you could extend it to systems in which large portions of source are available (since that is the kind of project C&B discussed) such as iOS and perhaps Java. Google Chrome. vBulletin. The Pine MUA. The ssh.com RFC 4253 implementation. Various parts of RHEL. And probably numerous…

> I agree with phkamp that it is weird that you can't think of any.

We can think of many but the point is to make sure we're on the same page. It's not like all software projects in the world are neatly divided into "bazaar" and "cathedral". I don't know that Google Chrome is a "cathedral", for instance.

It's ridiculous that the author refuses to give a single example, instead opting to say basically "see! You people don't know what a cathedral is, just like I said."

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#124

Post by lifeisstillgood »

jballanc wrote: post #93
phkamp wrote: post #58

OK, I'll make a couple of general observations here. First: It would be a big help for this discussion, if we could have the informal convention that people who were employed in an IT job before 1990 marked their post. I think it would show a quite clear divergence of attitude. Second: It's very obivious, that a lot of you have never been anywhere near the kind of software project posited in the "cathedral" meme, ins…

First: Have you ever looked at a plot of people for/against mariage rights for gays vs age? I suspect that the clear divergence does exist, but may not mean what you think it means... Second: I worked on OS X. In fact, I worked on Snow Leopard, and the start of Lion. What's interesting about that, is that Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X developed according to the "Cathedral" model. Also, while the Snow Leop…

I am sorry, but I would like to come in on that first comment. I think I understand the point you are making (if you grew up in a time of cathedrals you will rate them highly) but it can be taken as an ad hominem attack - one I am sure you did not intend, and would be beneath the HN quality level (its a Cathedral to debate round here)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#125

Post by csears »

phkamp wrote: post #112
peterwwillis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Care to enlighten? (Regardless of what may have prompted its development, its use since around 1992 doesn't really discredit my point... It takes care of things for the user that FOSS doesn't deal with, or at least not in a portable way)

InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves. Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint, by 3rd. party software developers.

I don't think they were ever acquired by Microsoft. Perhaps you're thinking of Macrovision.

They've gone through several company names and changes in ownership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallShield

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#126

Post by IvarTJ »

jballanc wrote: post #47
phkamp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... but evolution will also quite happily run you over a cliff which you have been avoided if intelligence were applied. Not to mention the fact that the bazaar is never going to put a man on the moon. And yes, I wrote that piece.

Except that evolution did put a man on the moon...unless you are one of those who don't believe humans are the result of 3 billion years of evolution? What you have to consider is that individual cells evolved, until they created a whole greater than themselves. No individual cell was in control of that first step Armstrong took onto the moon. Likewise, what we end up creating from so much "bazaar" development will a…

Right. Not never, but after 3 billion years.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#127

Post by papsosouid »

How ironic that this complaint of poor quality and lowered standards comes from a FreeBSD developer who actively attacks people who care about producing quality software. Cathedral vs bazaar isn't the issue. It is simply putting quality as a priority vs not making it a priority. Which is why some cathedrals produce poor quality software (freebsd), and others produce high quality software (netbsd).

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#128

Post by pmjordan »

jballanc wrote: post #113
anu_gupta wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that a lot of people (myself included) think that Snow Leopard is a better OS than both Lion and Mountain Lion.

I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. If you are trying to build something that nobody is asking for, you can't beat the cathedral model! ;-) I will tell you, though, that Snow Leopard missed its ship date by 8 months (of…

I can't speak for the gp, but I certainly would still be on Snow Leopard if development for the current version of iOS was still supported on it. I'm now seriously considering switching back to Linux as a desktop OS as I hardly do any iOS work anymore. (I've rather fallen out of love with that platform too as it's pretty clear that the only objective is selling me a new iPad+iPhone every year as this year's iOS always runs like crap on last year's hardware)

I guess post Snow Leopard era OSX and Apple apps just feel cheap, unpolished and rushed. It actually feels a lot like Windows, where quality of different parts of the system varies wildly.

Examples: Finder and anything file browsing related beachballs much more than before (particularly when dealing with network shares). Visual design seems to have taken a hit - everything seems to just consist of either different murky shades of grey, or jarring skeumorphism. The 10.6-era AHCI kernel panic hasn't happened for a while now, so maybe that was fixed in a newer revision of 10.7 or 10.8, but userspace stability seems much worse. Some of it is crashes, some just weird UI glitches that require a restart or Force Quit. Old problems (like Mail.app reliability or the heap of shit that is iTunes) are ignored completely in favour of sexing up the UI. (the runaway dynamic pager issue FINALLY seems better on 10.8, but again we get loads of other regressions)

Add to that what you say: the "improvements" leave most people I know completely cold or even get in the way, and that's not just power users/developers. Since we're "paying" for the (subjectively) unnecessary bling with regressions, the overall impression is that of a negative change.

Not that any of this is particularly relevant to the development model. You can end up with festering layers of crap with either model if nobody feels responsible for overall quality. I suspect the objective for Lion was "make OSX look kind of like iOS and get rid of all of that GPLv3 software" and that's basically what was achieved. I guess bug-free software isn't good business, Microsoft were printing money for decades.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#129

Post by jballanc »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #124
jballanc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First: Have you ever looked at a plot of people for/against mariage rights for gays vs age? I suspect that the clear divergence does exist, but may not mean what you think it means... Second: I worked on OS X. In fact, I worked on Snow Leopard, and the start of Lion. What's interesting about that, is that Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X developed according to the "Cathedral" model. Also, while the Snow Leop…

I am sorry, but I would like to come in on that first comment. I think I understand the point you are making (if you grew up in a time of cathedrals you will rate them highly) but it can be taken as an ad hominem attack - one I am sure you did not intend, and would be beneath the HN quality level (its a Cathedral to debate round here)

Not intended as an ad hominem as much as a reductio ad absurdum. It is frequently true that the views held by those older are also more likely to be correct, but it is not guaranteed. This is especially true when the views relate to social norms, views on which few people change as they get older. Cathedral vs Bazaar is probably as close to an argument of social norms as the software world gets...

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#130

Post by dasil003 »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #121
jballanc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. If you are trying to build something that nobody is asking for, you can't beat the cathedral model! ;-) I will tell you, though, that Snow Leopard missed its ship date by 8 months (of…

The majority wanted to have scrolling inverted?

The majority have never known an Apple product that worked any other way.
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