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Comment by billswift | Hacker News Reader

Your essay was unbalanced, yes open source sucks in the way you complained about, but Microsoft sucks even worse in some ways (if not quite as badly in others). Complaining about something in isolation is easy; everything sucks compared to perfection. But how is it compared to the real alternatives.

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It amazes me that the argument against this is by attacking some "standard-bearer of his cause." Let's not ask how it is compared to existing alternatives, or to 'perfection', but rather the potential alternatives. Your argument is akin to "stop talking about 'engines'; horse-drawn carriages might suck, but so does walking."

He's not talking about engines though, but at about some golden age in Unix's history when All was Right. Or at least that's part of what I got from it.

He also mentions 'one person having responsibility'. Does he mean a benevolent dictator? Linux and Python have that. They're imperfect in their own ways too.

Who said anything about Microsoft ?

it's a prominent example of the "cathedral" model.

First, it's actually not, because their architecture is focused on architecting a market, not a computing solution.

Second, just because there is one bad example of a cathedral, doesn't mean the cathedral model is bad.

Many years ago, a fella named Gettys (look him up!) wrote as part of sage advice for OSS philosophy:

"The only thing worse than generalizing from one example, is generalizing from no example at all."

> Second, just because there is one bad example of a cathedral, doesn't mean the cathedral model is bad.

right, but this could be applied to your example of the "configure" script as an indictment of the "bazaar" model too. Surely there's software that's come from the "bazaar" model that you feel is of high quality ? There's none whatsoever ?

I think it's a cultural reflex. Microsoft has been paying so many people to criticize open source for so long that the first reaction when people see what they interpret as baseless criticism is to look for Ballmer's sweaty palm prints.

I understand where you stand and agree some of your criticism is valid, but "quality" doesn't have the same meaning for everyone.

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