A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

People are getting confused between two different categories for software.

Software License metric: [F] Free and Open Source, [P] Proprietary/Closed source

This metric can also be modeled as a continuous variable rather than a discrete variable. But let us stick to two values for simplicity.

Development model metric: ranges from extremely [C] Cathedral-type, .........., to extremely [B] Anarchism/Bazaar-type

FOSS proponents don't care about development model as long as it's FOSS.

Let [x][y] denote the Software License metric (x) and Development model metric (y) of a software project.

Observations:

1. [P][C] is the combination that FOSS proponents hate the most.

2. [x][B] where x ∈ {F, P}; is less peer-reviewed (anyone can commit anything), so less accountability/responsibility, highly decentralized, so no guarantee of quality.

2.1. [P][B] sounds like a contradiction!

2.2. [F][B] Poul-Henning Kamp seems to have problems with this kind of setups.

3. [F][y] where y -> B (i.e. closer to [B] than it's closer to [C]). Mostly same as [F][C] except that it is mildly better.

4. [F][C] In this setup, the cathedral authority is the bottleneck in improving the project.

5. [F][y] where y -> C (i.e. closer to [C] than it's closer to [B]). This kind of setup "works like a charm!" See the overall success of GNU/Linux in the industry! There are some people who act as maintainers of Linux, but come on, you too can become one! The more popular such a software is the more thoroughly it is reviewed. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

All of this is just such antagonistic linkbate if you ask me. No offense to OP, but it really just seems like oh I had a controversial thought so I'll play up two sides.

Maybe one isn't better than the other? Maybe they are just different kinds of things and some people work better in one or the other. Maybe some projects do to. We live and work in dynamic environments and there is no big T Truth in design. People change, the requirements change, the market changes.

Indulging in this kind of petty software holier-than-thou while highlighting only flaws and failures as defining characteristics of another generation is only destructive for the entire community.

If OP was serious this would have actually been about showing a new generation of coders good cathedrals, and not just banal whining.

If Linux became more popular/more widely supported by mere chance, then there's nothing to argue about, and nothing to learn...

I write this as a thankful and proud user of Varnish; which =I assume= phkamp would place as a cathedral type of software. I agree with; quality requiring someone being responsible, importance of code reuse, and the observation of full 10 years of dumb copy/paste (though i believe in copy/paste). Eric Raymond's distinction of Cathedral/Bazaar is somewhat a useless dichotomy, on the problems mentioned. Here are 2 examples how Varnish could do better (independent of being developed as bazaar or cathedral)

1) Varnish does not support SSL, which complicates deployment architectures; and part of the the blame goes to lack of a good ssl implementation to copy from or to write an SSL proxy; https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/ssl.html I find this as an example of why neither bazaar nor cathedral based approaches yielding something "acceptable" in past 15 years, to copy and paste from.

2) Varnish VCL, as a DSL looks as obscure M4 macro language and the functions are not well planned; and another guy (from the bazaar) would design some more coherent language.

=> To my mind the culprit is the scarcity of monetization opportunities for infrastructure components, which pushes talent (candidates for "being responsible") to elsewhere where money is. I mean, nginx/varnish developers should earn 100s of millions; according to their merit. People are making billions by using ruby, python, rails, sinatra, django, debian, varnish, nginx, openssl, and hundreds of libraries for libtool... but their everyday creators don't get enough reward back to feel responsible. Passion and hobby, benevolence or PR are the only drivers for most infrastructure and library development. Some developers lose their faith in a man's lifespan, fight back or quit in full despair.

It's not chance, but it was very likely due to market conditions that have little to do with development methodologies or outright code quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi was hugely crippling at a very critical moment.

In a similar vein, PostgreSQL lost out to MySQL in no small part due to:

- PHP supported MySQL out of the box.

- MySQL was slightly easier to get running.

If there's a lesson we ought to learn, it's that market success may be partially or fully disassociated from actual merit relative to other market entrants. We've seen this in commercial software. It would be foolish to think it doesn't apply to open-source.