Monoculture

indiewebcamp.com

11 points·voltagex_··3 comments

This strikes me with connotations from critical and literary theory of social sciences. Software architectures begin to resemble social structures such as governing bodies in a country, hierarchies in an organization and the protocols with which they implement interaction between human agents. Eventually the two might intermingle in such a way that the recent discourses may affect what will happen in social domains in the future. In software, too, there's already an ongoing almost ideological rather than practical conflict between the two ends of the cathedral and the bazaar frontiers for a long time. Gladly and hopefully the software culture is going in the bazaar way.

> Gladly and hopefully the software culture is going in the bazaar way.

That is, towards chaos, inefficiency and fragmentation? :P.

In software world, we pride ourselves of having at least some semblance of sense in the discussions about approaches and methodologies; the cathedral/bazaar model is not an evil/good model; both approaches have applications for which they're the best.

"No one particular project should be considered a 'distributed social network'"

What? Something can be a distributed without being interoperable.

This article is humorously unbalanced. Sounds like someone venting. Even the counterpoint section is called "Perceived Advantages", haha.

Clearly, interoperability (or the lack thereof) can be taken to extremes; the hard part is finding the right balance. There's nothing in this article that helps with that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com