Hacker News Reader

Comment by brid | Hacker News Reader

The Cathedral metaphor doesn't make any sense since the point of the Cathedral is simultaneously to revere God and to be able to take in as many "unwashed masses" as possible. Only by self-exclusion (explicit external irreverence/scandal) can you be excluded.

View on HN

The metaphor does not refer to the finished building but to the building process

The “unwashed masses” are the end users; both “cathedrals” and “bazaars” welcome all users to partake without demanding an entry fee. The difference between a “cathedral” v. a “bazaar” is whether or not those “unwashed masses” are easily able to become the “staff”; the analogy hinges on the relative difficulty required to join the “clergy” v. become a “merchant”.

It works for me. Cathedral is analogous to free software being a religion. It is a theocratic worldview that has a zealous following that must apply the rituals of old. Bazaar is the marketplace. It is supposed to be a efficient market metaphor for software being transactional and not relational.

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.

But ESR believed in right wing, libertarian adjacent politics. He's advocating for deregulated, free market ideas in the form of criticizing GNU. In doing this, he was seeking out the preferred metaphor and working backwards, rather than describing what is.

That is not what Eric S. Raymond (esr) was describing.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com