Relevant again with Federated Software: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Gnubyte@lemdit.com to Programming@programming.dev – 107 points –

An old publication more relevant now than ever - The Cathedral and the Bazaar. A comparison of software practices in the early 2000s with some retrospective to how great software is built.

I think much of the writing can be applied to today's federated content models.

In particular:

  • The Mail Must Get Through
  • Necessary Preconditions for the Bazaar Style
  • The Importance of Having Users
11

fuck ESR

all my homies hate ESR

i'm out of the loop. what about him?

He went from a let-and-let-live, free-loving libertarian; to a more "kooky" libertarian. IMO, he was more palatable 20 years ago than now; though it's hard to top the fall-from-grace Stallman has had...

This is something that makes me sad. Stallman and Raymond were heros to me when I was starting out 20 years ago. I guess it goes to show that people are flawed no matter how talented.

Browsing post with phone in front of the book between my eyes and shelf ATM

But also this for balance:

A Generation Lost In The Bazaar https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

I honestly read this every year. There are some deep lessons there that are so important for software and product development in general. It gets better every time I read it.

This is an interesting article. I don't know anything about kernel development, but I wonder if it's still true?