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The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

dbreunig.com

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

#61

Post by drob518 »

skybrian wrote: post #41
drob518 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, is that a good thing? There’s still something to be said for experience, no?

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

#62

Post by bee_rider »

skybrian wrote: post #29
drob518 wrote: post #26

So, I’ve explored AI coding, but my conclusion up to this point has been that it’s interesting, but the code is sometimes a mess, and sometimes it will completely crater the project to the point where you just have to throw it all away and start over. After reading this article, I keep wondering if we’re really being productive or just creating lots of crappy code at machine speeds now. It’s one thing to say that we…

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?

Maybe the bots should be made to write MISRA-C. It isn’t like they get annoyed, right?

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

positron26 wrote: post #57
layer8 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying "not really" to is the claim that the "cathedral" does only refer to the GNU project and not to proprietary closed source. This is not the case. It refers to certain portions of GNU, as well as to certain segments of proprietary closed source. Neither GNU nor proprietary closed source is a criterion for the "cathedral". The criterion is the size and complexity of the software, independent of whether i…

> The criterion is the size and complexity of the software The criterion is the development process, not the complexity. Linux is complex, but not a Cathedral. I don't want to split hair with your words more. For context, FSF hard liners since the dawn of the OSI were distorting the meaning of CatB to deflect criticism from themselves. FSF supporters also very successfully promoted "FLOSS" instead of bare _OSS, givin…

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by layer8 »

positron26 wrote: post #57
layer8 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying "not really" to is the claim that the "cathedral" does only refer to the GNU project and not to proprietary closed source. This is not the case. It refers to certain portions of GNU, as well as to certain segments of proprietary closed source. Neither GNU nor proprietary closed source is a criterion for the "cathedral". The criterion is the size and complexity of the software, independent of whether i…

> The criterion is the size and complexity of the software The criterion is the development process, not the complexity. Linux is complex, but not a Cathedral. I don't want to split hair with your words more. For context, FSF hard liners since the dawn of the OSI were distorting the meaning of CatB to deflect criticism from themselves. FSF supporters also very successfully promoted "FLOSS" instead of bare _OSS, givin…

The complexity is when ESR thought the cathedral would be required. Linux then changed his mind.

I see no indication that ESR thought the cathedral model was limited to the FSF, as opposed to being applicable to software development in general.

I have no stake in the FLOSS/OSS/whatever controversies.

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

#66

Post by gorfian_robot »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #49
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 du…

it is still a cool house and I enjoy the tour. but I lag back and ignore the guide.

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

#67

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

You are arguing theology about who the cathedral metaphor was aimed at. The primary sources from ESR's own flagship pre-CatB project are public and open to examination.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews (TMNN) was ESR's failed magnum opus, a solo netnews rewrite: long private work, one rough beta, then done. That is the isolated cathedral process CatB later criticised when it was other people's work. The tree from the historic tmnn7-8.tar.Z is here:

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/tree/main

Read the LICENSE as evidence, not as law homework: anti-censorship language, FSF distancing, GPL-style terms, and a consulting pitch labeled as an unabashed commercial plug inside the license text:

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/LICENSE

Then read fascist.c: real filename, FASCIST and COMMUNIST compile switches, suppress/deny and ADM/authorized rules for who may post or read. That is operator gatekeeping in code, not a metaphor.

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/src/D.new...

ESR talks in that LICENSE like the speech police are the enemy. In the same distribution, fascist.c is the speech police: it encodes who may post, who may read, site suppressions, and deny rules off an authorized file. That is not a subtle contradiction. It is the same person packaging a freedom sermon with operator-controlled posting and reading. Calling that anything other than hypocrisy is charity he did not earn.

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

#68

Post by DonHopkins »

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.

[dead]

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

#69

Post by skybrian »

drob518 wrote: post #61
skybrian wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, is that a good thing? There’s still something to be said for experience, no?

Yes, getting out of college already having some experience using coding agents seems good.
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