todsacerdotiJan 13

The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar

https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/01-cathedral-megachurch-bazaar/

The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral. Except if we look at how things evolved, it wasn’t actually a bazaar. It was a bunch of roadside churches that are now megachurches. But there is still a bazaar, and it’s holding up our modern infrastructure.

Open Source Security
Show threadtptacekJan 18

It was a bad essay at the time and I don't think you can make a good essay by trying to build off it. Adding "megachurch" to the already strained metaphor didn't improve it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35939383

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999) | Hacker News

Show threadsethev
As you point out in your linked comment, the original essay captured the zeitgeist of the time. It also influenced and inspired many people. From that perspective, it's hard for me to agree that it was bad. However, I don't think the content was original at the time (perhaps that's what you mean by bad?) - in the sense that ESR wasn't out ahead of people blazing some new trail and it also didn't hold up very well factually.
Jan 18 at 10:25pmWeb
Show threadtptacekJan 18
It was certainly influential. It's just bad on its own merits.
Show threadlurk2Jan 18

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hacker News Guidelines

Show threadtptacekJan 18

(1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents). It isn't a general prohibition on critique, which would be silly.

(2) You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.

Show threadlurk2Jan 19

> (1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents).

There’s nothing I’m seeing in the text as it is written that suggests this to be the case. There are just a lot of comments I see that amount to: “I don’t like this,” which can be an interesting signal by itself but not if users refuse to elaborate on it, which is what I (erroneously) thought was happening here.

> You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.

I did miss it, sorry. I clicked through and didn’t notice that the top comment was yours. I assumed you were just linking to a past discussion.

I’m sure you already know this, but on the off chance you don’t, you can click on a comment’s timestamp to get a permalink to the specific comment, like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940773

Just taken on its merits, I think a case can be made that this is one of the mos... | Hacker News

Show threadtptacekJan 19

HN is a common law system; the real guidelines are the guidelines page itself, and the "jurisprudence" of years and years of Dan (and Tom) writing moderator comments. But you also know you're a little off the rails when you've derived a rule that would prohibit, say, criticism of a book --- "Teach Yourself C In 24 Hours is a bad book". Of course that's OK!

But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated with me too if I just said "CATB is bad!" and left it at that.