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The Cathedral and the Bizarre

marktarver.com

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Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#41

Post by ohazi »

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 counterparts, both in quality, and in their ability to be extended and customized. Customization is not going to be cheap or easy, but it will at least be possible.

The fact that I wrote a toy renderer in Rust five years ago and haven't touched it since then doesn't change this. The fact that there are 100 or 1000 times as many toy projects as there are serious projects doesn't change this either.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#42

Post by buzzkillington »

stefan_ wrote: post #34
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 ..

Being insane does not mean you're wrong.

If we're going to say that X is wrong because Y said it, well Stallman is an albatross around the neck of everyone who talks about free software.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#44

Post by buzzkillington »

doublement wrote: post #9
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…

Moreover he's using the large amount of wreckage to argue that the Darwinian process of selecting "category killers" isn't working, which is completely backwards. If "category killer" is a winner-take-all competition, then there are going to be a vast number of losers, and we do see a vast number of unmaintained projects. It's just that no one is bothering to remove them from view when they're defeated.

I'm unaware that the goal of evolution is to have one lion win the lion competition and eat all other lions.

Maybe we should stop using bad metaphors? Writing software is not a Darwinian process, neither is competition on the market place. Unless you got your OS by randomly twiddling bits in the binary file, in which case why are we even talking about open source?

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#45

Post by braythwayt »

I’m saying nothing for or against the rest of the article, but this one sentence does not describe software as I know it: “But above all this is the sheer waste of human effort in terms of the production of rotting software in repositories.”

The act of writing code changes the programmer. I have written many things that didn’t turn into successful open source, nor did they act as resume-ware. But the act of writing them taught me something.

There is no waste of human effort involved when you practice your craft. This is like telling me that if I climb a cliff and then lower myself back to the ground, I haven’t gone anywhere.

Right now I’m working on implementing a subset of regular expressions that compile to finite-state recognizers. There is a zero-percent chance that my working code will be used in production.

So what? I am learning something about pattern-matching, and perhaps it will grow into a little language like SNOBOL.

http://raganwald.com/2019/09/21/regular-expressions.html

If that is a waste, then most of my most enjoyable moments programming were also a waste.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#46

Post by arminiusreturns »

I am not really responding to the article, but to the general concept of the Cathedral and the Bazarr.

The main problem is this: in sufficiently complex programs, roughly associated with LOC, there becomes a point where there are no longer enough eyes on enough pieces of code.

Therefore, I propose that the future of FOSS in the Bazarr style is to focus on reducing code complexity and increase readability as much as possible.

“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” - Bruce Lee

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#47

Post by buzzkillington »

m463 wrote: post #33
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.

> And corporations are formed of people.

So was the Nazi party.

The problem is with the distribution of benefits. Much like the vaulted Lebensraum the question is who gets the land and who gets to be fertilizer for the land.

So far the answer to the first is Bezos, and to the second is everyone who isn't Bezos. A distribution that leaves something to be desired of.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#48

Post by buzzkillington »

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…

Not really, that would imply they read the article instead of the title.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#49

Post by coldtea »

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…

>Somehow the link [0] cited in the article makes an indirect similar point, but what's wrong with programs which are not updated?

Bit rot, for one (not keeping up with changing OSes, APIs they talk to, environments, libs they use, security concerns, etc), but also the fact that when they stopped updating they were still incomplete and more often than not half arsed.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#50

Post by zozbot234 »

braythwayt wrote: post #45

I’m saying nothing for or against the rest of the article, but this one sentence does not describe software as I know it: “But above all this is the sheer waste of human effort in terms of the production of rotting software in repositories.” The act of writing code changes the programmer. I have written many things that didn’t turn into successful open source, nor did they act as resume-ware. But the act of writing t…

> But above all this is the sheer waste of human effort in terms of the production of rotting software in repositories.

Yup, what about the amount of human effort that has been wasted in the course of producing off-the-shelf proprietary software? How much of that proprietary stuff is now entirely useless, for some reason or another? It's just so weird to make an engineering-focused argument for proprietary stuff, when the only case that's even remotely plausible is about production incentives, and everything else hugely favors FLOSS.

As an aside, I'm pretty sure that, in the medium-to-long run, we'll manage to fund FLOSS development to an entirely satisfactory extent via crowdfunding, and that while saving a lot of dough compared to what it would take to fund proprietary development in the same way.

But in fact, even his point about support revenues is misguided. Well-designed and easy-to-use software does not really draw fewer paid-support arrangements than software that's hackish, unintuitive and the like. The nees for paid support is almost entirely an organizational one, so it matters zilch how easy the software is to support in reality; it's far more important that the organization can point to that support contract if any such need should arise.

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