The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House • Hacker News Board

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#41

Post by skybrian » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

drob518 wrote: post #32

skybrian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software developers working on their own have built monstrosities before (not as quickly) but it seems likely that this is a skill issue and we will learn how to use these tools better. You can tell coding agents to work on cleaning up code, improving the architecture, and so on. Maybe adopting some hard constraints on code complexity that agents have to work within would help?

Yep, surely humans write bad code, too. But not nearly as fast. This feels a lot like hiring oodles of hyper-productive junior developers. Are we going to get true productivity out of that or a scrambled mess? I don’t know the answer to that. Or maybe the models get so much better that it’s like hiring oodles of senior developers and architects and the payoff is real.

It used to be that most college graduates had little or no experience working on large-scale projects. Now they’ll get to speed-run the issues involved in maintaining a large project.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#42

Post by zdragnar » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

7rirdnj wrote: post #8

> Which is why maintainers feel like they’re drowning. How about actually funding opensource project mantainers? We have non profit orgs, that eat billions of public funds. We spend biilions for influencing hardly measurable metrics, with very nebulous benefits in far distant future. Direct sponsoring of critical projects would have far better and concrete benefits.

Why spend more money just to trawl through BS contributions? Cutting off the nonsense would be both cheaper and have the same result.

More funding for more development of open source is a good thing, but more money to ease the burden imposed by an ever rising tide of slop is not a solution.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#43

Post by positron26 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #30

gerikson wrote: post #7

The "cathedral" in ESR's essay wasn't proprietary closed source, it was the GNU project.

The essay also didn't kick anything off; it was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.

GNU didn't kick anything off. It was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.

What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball.

Many ideas from The Cathedral & The Bazaar made it into The Lean Startup. The Cathedral development model was more related to waterfall. YC was already chugging along, but you can bet your ass PG was already steeped in the tea.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#44

Post by tptacek » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

positron26 wrote: post #43

tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The essay also didn't kick anything off; it was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.

GNU didn't kick anything off. It was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing. What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball. Many id…

Huh? GNU absolutely kicked stuff off.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#45

Post by fragmede » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

Before, when code was laboriously produced by hand, sharing it so other people could use it was seen as a gift. Today there is no such incentive. If I pick up some software and find a bug in it or a feature it's missing, I can (have Claude) fix that bug or add that feature, and keep it to myself. Why bother contributing that fix or feature to the world if it's just going to be met with complaints and accusations of it being vibe coded slop? Just as maintainers don't owe me anything, by the rules of the license, if I'm not distributing the binaries, I don't owe the world a public fork of the source code with my changes.

The Winchester mystery house is notable for becoming a public tourist attraction instead of a closed private piece of real estate. How do we evolve the Cathedral and the Bazaar to the modern era? I don't know. I know that my life on my computer is drastically improved by spending an afternoon a week building better tooling for myself, and I realize it's built on top of other's contributions to the world, but at the same time, I don't know how to contribute back under the new regime.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#46

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #18

The_Goonies1985 wrote: post #13

>"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture." That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was su…

> That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house. Some tour guides have gone on record discussing their frustrations with having to repeat known falsehoods to guests. > Visit the house (the tour…

Wikipedia agrees with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House#Labyr...

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#47

Post by positron26 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #31

gerikson wrote: post #7

The "cathedral" in ESR's essay wasn't proprietary closed source, it was the GNU project.

Not really. From the essay: “I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals,…

> Unix-philosophy small tools that constitute an important part of the GNU project

The statement you chose makes a carve-out for Unix, not GNU. It doesn't support "not really."

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#48

Post by positron26 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #44

positron26 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU didn't kick anything off. It was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing. What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball. Many id…

Huh? GNU absolutely kicked stuff off.

I used a similarly shaped argument with different nouns to highlight the ambiguity, and now you see why that's problematic. Don't just make blind assertions without linking it back to some concrete, at least arguing that some mechanism was *dominant*.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#49

Post by burnt-resistor » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

gorfian_robot wrote: post #14

as an aside the lore about the "Winchester Mystery House" is all made up hogwash. here is one place where it is debunked: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/08/the-truth-about-sallie...

Seems about right and American: pervert a dead person's reputation and personality into a cartoonish mythological character to fabricate lore for a profitable tourist attraction. Add doors to nowhere and guided tours repeating misinformation, exit through the gift shop.

PS: While I grew up in San Jose, my parents unfortunately took me on that tour once. It looked extremely staged and all about $$$ then and I was a dumb kid. It occupied a plot of land in a very busy area across what is now Santana Row and beside the original hemispherical buildings of the first Century 21 theaters that originally had massive parking lots that extended all the way to Winchester Blvd back when people went to the movies. The parking lot was only eclipsed by the nearby Winchester Drive-In in Campbell. Where Santana Row is at the corner of Stevens Creek and Winchester was the car dealership Courtesy Chevrolet.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#50

Post by tptacek » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

positron26 wrote: post #48

tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? GNU absolutely kicked stuff off.

I used a similarly shaped argument with different nouns to highlight the ambiguity, and now you see why that's problematic. Don't just make blind assertions without linking it back to some concrete, at least arguing that some mechanism was *dominant*.

Right, but your similarly-shaped argument is clearly false, and mine clearly isn't.

I can see now that you expanded your comment after I wrote my response. Please leave a marker ("later:" or something) when you do that.