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Comment by spookie | Hacker News Reader

I fail to see the link, businesses come and go. Their software dies with them.

Businesses die. Cathedrals don't. IBM is 114 years old. Microsoft is 50. Google is 27. Disney is 101. Nintendo is 136 (they'll outlive Steam and the next nuclear war at this rate). The COBOL running banks is 65 years old. Windows NT architecture is 32. The platforms become infrastructure, too embedded to replace.

How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained? Go through GitHub's trending repos from 2015. Most are abandoned. The successes transform - GitLab, Linux, Kubernetes, more Cathedral than Bazaar.

Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib and GCC, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.

> Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.

Did BSD defeat Linux? No. Which BSD is even the right one? BSD's biggest success is living on as the foundation of Apple's Cathedral in XNU, and PlayStation's Cathedral in the PS4 and PS5.

Did Linux stay a bazaar vendor? No - 90% of code has been corporate contributed since 2004. Less than 3% of the Linux Foundation budget goes towards kernel development. Linux is a Cathedral, by every definition, and only exists today because Cathedrals invest in it for collective benefit. It's a Cathedral, run as a Cathedral joint venture, to be abandoned if a better thing for the investing Cathedrals ever came along.

GCC? Being clobbered by Clang. Less relevant every year. Same with GNU coreutils, slowly getting killed by uutils.

Firefox? Firefox only still exists because a Cathedral called Google funds it.

LibreOffice, Apache, PHP, Blender? Professional foundations that get very picky about who is allowed to contribute what. They aren't amateurs and they all depend on Cathedral funding. Blender only got good when it started collecting checks from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Adobe. Blender is a Cathedral funded by Cathedrals.

I feel like you're moving the goal posts and using the greed caliper for measuring open-source success. Open-source doesn't need "to win", because as long as they have developers, projects go on, and as long as they have any users they are still relevant.

Wtf is a bazaar vendor? A bazaar-style project is a project with a variety of contributors who aren’t necessarily affiliated with a central org, where decisions are made at least partially through consensus. Linux still fits this description although it’s more of a hybrid model at the moment, as decision-making is highly centralized. But as a free/open source project, that centralization exists with implicit community consensus. If a substantial portion of the community decided that Linus and his team were making poor decisions, a fork would emerge. This process of periodic de-/re-centralization is a common attribute of many long-term FOSS projects and is usually not possible with proprietary software, absent generosity or neglect from IP “owners”.

ffmpeg and vlc jump to mind. They certainly aren't a central org -- other than in vlc having a shared like of traffic cones. My understanding of the ffmpeg dev team is they barely tolerate each other.

That's such an American take. Something doesn't have to be a "winner" to be useful. I enjoy using FreeBSD on my desktop and I don't care about the 0.01% marketshare.

I really dislike all the corporate involvement in Linux. I don't believe in win-win with commercial. That was the main reason for my choice though there's other things I like too such as full ZFS support and great documentation.

> How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained?

Uhh, all the big ones in common use? GNU’s massive portfolio of software, Linux, multiple BSDs, Apache, Firefox, BusyBox, PHP, Perl, the many lineages of StarOffice, LaTeX, Debian, vim, fish, tmux, I mean this barely scratches the surface. Are you kidding me?

How many startups have failed over the last decade? I would argue that the norm is for any project to eventually cease. Only useful things with an active community (whether that community is for-profit or not) tend to last, until they are no longer valued enough to maintain. This goes for things in the physical world just as it does for software.

I we're doing bad analogies my mom's open source duck recipe has been around for hundreds of years.

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