This hides essential detail that would seem to very much weaken the argument. You have the Linux Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation that "make hundreds of millions of dollars", and then everyone else is orders of magnitude smaller. Python might be in third place, for all I know (or maybe it's Apache).
> It shows how most open source projects aren’t some giant megachurch like group. These projects are one person.
> It’s easy to assume everyone else is also a megachurch member, even if they are not. The church members are pretty noisy and get a lot of attention.
I suspect most of those random bazaar vendors would like to have a respectable church-sized building. Or at least a proper stall.
> If you look at modern day open source, it sometimes feels like the megachurch open source is better because they have a nice parking lot, give out donation receipts, and it doesn’t smell like kabobs.
Well, no; it has more to do with the sense that outsiders are taking the bazaar seriously.
A quick check implies Apache is on the order of half the size, though. When I wrote the other comment it was just the only other name that came to mind.
I believe the analogy breaks down here some. That is, actual bazaar vendors may want this (I suppose), but FOSS maintainers may or may not want an organization to form around them. They may be content with the way things are; or they may just want a co-maintainer.
I didn’t start programming until a few years later, but for sure by 2002, it seemed to me a given that compilers were free. It was my impression that stuff like Borland was niche and that serious stuff like Java and C were free.
Not saying you are wrong, just your comment surprised me. Maybe I have a revisionist memory or maybe those intervening 3 years were quite transformational in the industry.
Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.
But yeah imo you're closer to right than not, though Microsoft licenses were still fairly expensive.
(That's not the biggest flaw in the essay, of course. It made predictions, some of which turned out to be comically wrong. The true parts of it weren't new, and the new parts of it weren't true.)
If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.
(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.
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:
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.
It's absolutely fine to have a packed representation of a sum type "under the hood": this is how Rust implements Option<&T> (where T: Thin), for example. It's also fine to expose the layout of this packed representation to the programmer, as C's union does. But it's a huge footgun to have unchecked casts as the default. If not for this terrible convention, C wouldn't have any unchecked implicit casts: something like f(1 + 0.5) performs a coercion, a far more sensible behaviour.
The only reason we're talking about null pointers at all is because they were an influential idea, not because they were a good idea. Likewise with the essay.
And there's nothing wrong with that! But you should write it
union {
char *ptr;
size_t scalar;
} my_nullable_pointer;
if (my_nullable_pointer.scalar) {
printf("%s", my_nullable_pointer.ptr);
}
char *my_nullable_pointer;
if (my_nullable_pointer) {
printf("%s", my_nullable_pointer);
}
> The Hoare ALGOL W thing seems to be more relevant to null pointers in Java and the like.
I believe you are correct; but I like blaming Tony Hoare for things. He keeps scooping me: I come up with something cool, and then Tony Hoare goes and takes credit for it 50 years in the past. Who does he think he is, Euler?
Sort of right, sort of wrong.
From my understanding: older, simpler, architectures treat memory location zero as a normal memory address. On x86 and x64, the OS can configure the MMU to treat certain pages as invalid. Many years ago, I ran across a reference to Sparcs treating accesses to memory location zero as invalid. In other words, it depends upon which architecture you're dealing with.
This led to strange hardware implementations like "0 and 4 point to 0x800000 and 0x800004 (or wherever the ROM is) until a latch is cleared, then they point to 0" - with the latch being cleared fairly early in the boot process. This let you create a different entry point for soft and hard boot, if you wanted.
In that implementation, you could read and write to 0, once the latch was cleared.
mov rax, qword ptr [0]I'm annoyed at the arc these discussions invariably take into Raymond's backstory or whatever, because I think CATB fails objectively, on its own merits (or lack thereof) and we don't need to wade into this other stuff. But if we're having the discussion: seems like kind of a wild statement to say he's any reasonable person's role model.
Their positive influence on open source is real; that doesn't make them, as people, role models.
>The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.
> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
> I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation.
Reminder that the subject of his writing is a 17 year old girl that was raped by one of Epstein's clients
I think the important part is there must always remain a possibility for someone to exit that box. Repentance and forgiveness are key values in themselves, and we must be able to accept people if they can change.
Unrepentant garbage people who still make garbage statements and do garbage things, however, can remain in the dumpster where they belong until such time they warrant climbing out.
There’s also the risk someone very loud decides to put you in a box you don’t belong in. Eventually you are able to demonstrate it, but, in the meantime, you need to deal with the consequences.
I'll also say that there are enough aspects of our personality and behavior that you might use to justify placing someone in the "bad box" that almost everyone would be in one; and if you were to relax the criteria so that you "average badness" along multiple axes, that comes with its own problems.
This author seems to have some kind of attitude about organization in general—anything with people and process, that happens to exist around some project, that might require at least a small commitment to be a part of. Like complaining that a flea market has a form to sign.
The ability for people to functionally collaborate, with some kind of structure, is the key thing that enables building large things together.
This is trolling right?
Yes, and well done as well. Unlike the other two unmentionables, Linus very much worthy of remembrance. Sure he was extra grumpy for a long time but that's about the only bad thing you can say about the man.
OpenPrinting is listed as a funded project:
https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/openprinting
yet 7 days ago someone who works on OpenPrinting was here and stated:
"The whole printing stack is supported by 4 people, 2 of whom are doing that since the inception of CUPS in 1999. Scanning is maintained by a single person."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579361
Isn't this the situation the Sovereign Tech Agency is trying to avoid?
This makes me wonder - is there some platform on which people who maintain important (or arguably-important) facilities can post Wanted ads for volunteer co-maintainers?
I realize that the number of people who would actually be crazy enough to browse that platform and answer such ads is pretty small... but - it may be noticeably above Zero.
There are still a lot of space for projects without much structure- if you have NSA codenames that aren’t public yet (and you are not subject to US laws) you can contribute with the nsaname tool and have cool names for your servers and containers. If you want to help adding glyphs to my 3278 font, you can. You can do that to millions of small projects that are small enough to not require much structure.
Is this a perfect metaphor? I think its a rigid way of looking at software on either side. I think it is more grey. I like the merits of both sides.
GNUnix was developed using the Cathedral-style, Linux was developed using the bazaar-style. How Linux development was coordinated was thought to be impossible for something that had to be as solid as an operating system. The essay is a deep dive, exploring the conditions that the Linux project needed to ship an OS.
This does seem very bazaar to me, but this would all be deemed Not Open Source by the [cathedral/megachurch?] community, correct? Do people take issue with npm using the term open source?
When something is obviously wrong, perhaps learn to ask yourself if it's trying to be funny. Is dead Python funny?
Love it
In particular:
> A bazaar or souk is a marketplace consisting of multiple small stalls or shops [...] They are traditionally located in vaulted or covered streets that have doors on each end and served as a city's central marketplace.
> Merchants specialized in each trade were also organized into guilds, which provided support to merchants but also to clients. The exact details of the organizations varied from region to region. Each guild had rules that members were expected to follow, but they were loose enough to allow for competition. Guilds also fulfilled some functions similar to trade unions and were able to negotiate with the government on behalf of merchants or represent their interests when needed.
> Historically, in Islamic cities, the muḥtasib was the official in charge of regulating and policing the bazaar and other aspects of urban life. They monitored things such as weights and measures, pricing, cleanliness, noise, and traffic circulation, as well as being responsible for other issues of public morality. They also investigated complaints about cheating or the quality of goods.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazaar )
So not quite the anarchocapitalist, self-organizing utopia that tech people seem to imagine there - in fact, they have a lot of organization, both between merchants as well as on the bazaar as a whole.
Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.
In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.
With one difference: At least the administrators of real bazaars were public officials with a mandate to keep the market fair - and there was organization among the vendors in form of guilds. With digital marketplaces, the markets themselves are private assets and the administrators are blatantly self-interested. And there doesn't seem to be any kind if higher-order organization across different open source projects, everyone is fighting on their own.
So maybe it would do the open source community good to become more like an actual bazaar.
>In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.
Id put it that this is incorrect insofar - as the bazaar was/is a public commons with a dual regulatory environment city(state) and the guilds , which would enforce/regulate as needed.
The digital marketplaces we have would be more anologous to feudal plantations ,where each coder(sharecropper) survives at the whim of their particluar feudal lord , who have total control within that space and the state via lobbying mostly keeps off.Theer are no guild equivalent so when Playstore/Github makes a ruling like the recent hike of dev fees or ci runner. Theres no state or user leverage that can force a reversal other than complaints.
Paradoxically id say they are more megachurch than bazaars.
I'm writing an article on a similar topic, but it's a critique on a popular development style that imports a huge dependency supply chain (without concern on if they are cathedral, bazaar, or megachurches), and what the benefits of building your thing bottom-up has.
If this sounds interesting to you, hacker news reader, you can leave a comment and I'll reply with a link once it's published.
“We should tax everyone to fund open source” they say
“Google should pay a percentage of their gross revenue to the Rust Software Foundation” they say
All this is because it’s enough for the bazaar to create but the author has correctly identified that the purpose of the megachurches is to receive tithes.
The Rust megachurch is one of the biggest proponents of this and its adherents are always trying to take our money by force because we won’t give it by will https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048954
Rust delenda est.
Rust delenda est.
It's going to happen and I know what side I'd rather be on.
Rust delenda est.
Rust delenda est.
It's a joke
I didn't make it past the tldr lol is this some kind of poisoned data for GPT 6?
A lot of FOSS people think this but it's not really true. It was a thorn in the side of MS executives as a competitor, sure, but I never met anyone in the rank and file that could be bothered to hate Linux. More than a few of my colleagues played with Linux at home in the '00s. I cut my teeth on the commercial UNIXes so there wasn't anything interesting about Linux to me until it had caught up with them around 2010 or so.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...
Microsoft messaging was very clear at the time