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The Cathedral and the Bizarre

marktarver.com

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Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#31

Post by newnewpdro »

Unfinished experiments that aspire(d) to be something relevant are more like vaporware, not abandonware. I'd argue the vast majority of what's on github is this or dirty hacks that never warranted any further development or maintenance.

There's actually substantial value in access to such things. Rather than repeating the experiments yourself, you can go see where they led others without investing the time and energy to repeat the effort. If you find something that mostly resembles what you would have made, can get along with the license, and still wish to move forward - huzzah, a jump starting fork is born.

Abandonware IMHO is more appropriately applied to examples like Google's ever growing list of abandoned projects that actually had users, where the world noticed the abandonment of something useful.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#32

Post by m463 »

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'm not a researcher, I'm a programmer.

The same abandonment happens within healthy corporations with proprietary source code.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#33

Post by m463 »

Palomides wrote: post #4

there's a lot of nits to pick about this essay, but the real punchline is that corporations have reaped the profits from open source software, far more than any developers do directly, and that claim seems hard to dispute.

I think a lot of people have reaped the benefits of open source software. And corporations are formed of people.

It is a check and balance on proprietary software, in quality, cost, privacy and independence.

It has benefitted developers directly, in education, in transferrence of skills to other employers, and in direct customization of software for their personal needs.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#34

Post by stefan_ »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #13

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 configur…

That's a mild description of what appear to be the incoherent ramblings of a nutcase. He keeps a blog here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/qilang

in case you are interested in learning how bad chi will influence your dealings with Shen, or Qi, or ..

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#35

Post by galaxyLogic »

r00fus wrote: post #27
galaxyLogic wrote: post #23

I've put some code I wrote up on GitHub. Why did I do it? 1. As a learning experience, how does GitHub work? 2. As advertisement for myself as software developer 3. As a check on myself, is the software good enough for others to use. When you do something publicly "on stage" it better be good. Not only good in terms of "code quality" but in terms of "does it do something useful?". So I think I've got some benefits fr…

I've got another one: 4. Breaking down that barrier of perfectionism that prevents you from publishing or finding worth in your creations.

HackerNews is open source, right? We share our ideas free of charge here. I'm not even aware of the copyright if any that applies to postings here. And we do it for fun, not for profit. But does it a great book make? Does it even make a magazine?

So I think the point of the article is that while Open Source has its uses, it is not and as far as we can see never will be a wholesale replacement for commercial software.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#36

Post by joppy »

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.

Bourbaki were certainly made up of a collection of leading mathematicians, but the works of Bourbaki are not innovations themselves. As much as I love the books, they do not contain major new results, rather they are an excellent organisation of pre-existing knowledge, perhaps with some novel proofs.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#37

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#38

Post by galaxyLogic »

empath75 wrote: post #28

He wrote this essay as if people haven’t made billions and billions of dollars from open source software.

I think he covers that a bit discussing Red Hat and other OS successes, and goes on to say "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"

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#39

Post by asveikau »

> In 1990 when you said a program was 'open source', you meant that you could read the source code; the actual code the person had written to create the program.

Citation needed. I don't think people were saying "open source" in 1990. FSF/GNU had the term "free software" for longer but they had to explain it on every first use. (Probably still do to an extent.)

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#40

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #25
sildur wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 conspirators [2].

[1] http://www.travistea.com/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050305143929/http://www.cs.du....

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