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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

> Return to Cathedral.

What does this mean?

It's a reference to Eric S. Raymond's famous article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux.

Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.

> ...where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux.

The Cathedral example was actually GNU, which is Not Unix (it's in the name!).

Shoot, you're absolutely right! It's been a long while since I last re-read the article, and I had forgotten how "targeted" (for lack of a better term) it was at certain specific individuals.

I don’t see how it’s foolish. When you mention a bazaar essentially no one thinks of the closed door meetings of the merchant guilds. Instead, they think of the hustle and bustle of a busy marketplace where all manner of goods, services, and ideas are openly exchanged.

This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.

Yeah, "foolish" maybe wasn't the right word. All metaphors fall short in some way (hence why they're metaphors). I just, knowing something of the history of that part of the world, like to use the opportunity to share the knowledge that, despite the appearances of a chaotic, random aggregation of humans, Bazaars often had a significant structure under the surface (perhaps another lesson about open source to be had there).

A closed-off development team releases what they want, and you take it or leave it, like sqlite.

FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

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