The Cathedral and the Bizarre

The Cathedral and the Bizarre
marktarver.com

On quality: quality is very suggestive. Quality changes if you factor in questions such as: Does it run well on low-end devices, does it track you, will it still open your files in 10 years, will the company still exist in 10 years, does it work well on many platforms, can it be automated, etc.

The cathedral and the bazaar was not a book, it was an essay. They apparently later turned it into a book but I know nobody who read the book. The essay, in contrast, was read by everybody in the scene.

Here's how I remember it.

Open source has no specific meaning before esr claimed it. And after he claimed it, crucially, open source did not mean you could not charge for the software.

I practice almost no source code was released under non-liberal licenses, but there are some notable exceptions. For example, Microsoft released the source code of the Windows kernel for research use to universities. AFAIK that technically means Windows is open source.

esr was not against releasing source code under non-liberal licenses. He was just convinced those would not stand a chance against code released under liberal licenses. Time has proven him right, I would say.

Also this article misses the point, I think. Open source was not meant to define or enshrine a methodology. It was coined because at the time people felt that the free software movement was holding itself back in the fight against Microsoft (google "halloween documents" to get more insight into esr's struggle against Microsoft) because it sounded like you could not make money with it. Also because the GNU General Public License said if you make changes to a piece of GPL code, the result must also be under the GPL. So in a sense GPL actually did impede commercial exploitation of free software.

At the time many libertarians (like esr) felt that the market would solve this if you just let it, and software is not the place to fight ideological wars about the freedom of software.

I'm just paraphrasing the arguments here as I understood them. Personally I come down on the pro-GPL side of the aisle.

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.