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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#331

Post by glaurent »

The fundamental flaw in CatB is that it was essentially an adaptation of ESR's libertarian creed, that Free Market is infallible and would always boil down to the best optimal solution. While that may work on the scale of a single project, it fails when applied to a full ecosystem, and thus we get dozens of competing projects aiming at the solving the same problems (WMs, desktops...).

It also postulated that code being open would incite devs to be as their technical best, in order to gain peer respect. That didn't happen either, quite the contrary the OSS community has proved to be rather conservative and traditional, Unix being seen as "The Right Way", not to be deviated from.

In short, the Bazaar model completely failed in its promise to always let the best solution win. What we got instead was perpetual chaos, and less than 1% of the desktop share.

I attended the 1st GUADEC back in 2000. If at that time we had known where we'd actually be 12 years later, we'd all have left in disgust.

I moved to OS X in 2008, my only regret was not doing it any sooner.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#333

Post by revorad »

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…

Instead of giving us pity and RTFM, it would help if you clearly specify what you think are the defining and distinguishing features of the cathedral and the bazaar models. There seems to be a lot of confusion around that.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#334

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#335

Post by Munksgaard »

DanBC wrote: post #220
phkamp wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe, just maybe I don't write for the lowest common denominator, but for people who can think for themselves.

I think Munksgaard is supporting you, and that there are some problems with different languages.

Indeed, it was not meant as an attack, merely trying explain his style. I enjoy reading his blog posts, but I readily admit that I often have to seek out some sort of elaboration, as it's not always evident what his stance is, or even what he's talking about (I often wish he'd provide some more context).

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#336

Post by podperson »

yxhuvud wrote: post #191
podperson wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I held IT jobs before 1990. Might I make the observation that when a software project is no longer able to be maintained by a single person or dynamic duo, it will tend to become a bazaar, no matter how cathedral-like it may have been before, and that the alternative is stagnation. I will cite as evidence two of my favorite programs ever: WriteNow (for Macintosh) an excellent early word-processor written entirely in…

There is a third alternative - split the project into manageable parts.

Good point but the problem is fundamentally fractal. For any project P it will either (a) stagnate, (b) go bazaar, or (c) be split into new sub-projects.

Most projects go nowhere, but once a project gains momentum it's going to split into pieces and each piece has a chance of "going bazaar" at each step.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#337

Post by papsosouid »

lmm wrote: post #297
papsosouid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reason your work machine, running BSD, works the way it does (and self-assembles that way) is because each part of its software environment is independent, designed for different goals and constraints and it just happens to work together well enough you can work with it No, that's not the case at all actually. FreeBSD like the other BSDs is a complete OS, designed and built as a complete OS. It is not a collecti…

arcueid ~ $ du -hs /usr/src 728M /usr/src arcueid ~ $ du -hs /usr/src/contrib/ 307M /usr/src/contrib/ So actually almost half of the FreeBSD OS is "random tools by various people thrown together". Compared to that, in something like Debian the GNU tools, designed and built by the GNU with the intention to form a complete OS, probably constitute a greater proportion of the core OS.

Going by the size of the source code, including the configure scripts, makefiles, etc for other operating systems is a rather disingenuous way to measure.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#338

Post by rimantas »

keeptrying wrote: post #178

Nature does pretty well with bazaar style development and she usually wins doesn't she? There's a lot to be said about building via rapidly iterating around feedback.

Not exactly. The result of "hops through the local minima" style design is hardly optimal. Yes, it works but is best of the worst more often than not.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#339

Post by lmm »

papsosouid wrote: post #337
lmm wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

arcueid ~ $ du -hs /usr/src 728M /usr/src arcueid ~ $ du -hs /usr/src/contrib/ 307M /usr/src/contrib/ So actually almost half of the FreeBSD OS is "random tools by various people thrown together". Compared to that, in something like Debian the GNU tools, designed and built by the GNU with the intention to form a complete OS, probably constitute a greater proportion of the core OS.

Going by the size of the source code, including the configure scripts, makefiles, etc for other operating systems is a rather disingenuous way to measure.

It was the simplest 30-second way to compare I could think of. If you have a more accurate measure then by all means post your results.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#340

Post by protomyth »

fusiongyro wrote: post #316
r00fus wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's been on OSX since Panther, I think you may have a slightly rose-tinted view of the past - lots of stuff in OSX has been improved - I remember pretty horrible kernel panics in 10.4 and userland issues in 10.5 that no longer exist since 10.6/10.7 (or have yet to show themselves). Driver support from vendors is vastly improved, and overall, though I agree that quality has been a bit hit-or-miss, the ove…

I've been here since 10.2 and IMO the only great releases of OS X were Panther and Snow Leopard, though Panther did begin the whole idiotic metal UI thing. Maybe 10.9 will rock?

I'm actually finding Mountain Lion much more stable than Lion or Snow Leopard. Lion had some really weird memory things and I did get multiple kernel panics in early Snow Leopard.
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