It was a bad essay at the time and I don't think you can make a good essay by trying to build off it. Adding "megachurch" to the already strained metaphor didn't improve it.
(That's not the biggest flaw in the essay, of course. It made predictions, some of which turned out to be comically wrong. The true parts of it weren't new, and the new parts of it weren't true.)
I didn’t start programming until a few years later, but for sure by 2002, it seemed to me a given that compilers were free. It was my impression that stuff like Borland was niche and that serious stuff like Java and C were free.
Not saying you are wrong, just your comment surprised me. Maybe I have a revisionist memory or maybe those intervening 3 years were quite transformational in the industry.
Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.
As MSFT partner, we also started our voyage to port the GUI frontends into the newly introduced .NET.
We used Red-Hat Linux internally for our CVS server, MP3 music shares and Quake lan parties.
That is how seriously we look at Linux in 2002.
Does Perl and Apache (as in httpd, not the foundation) counts?
They are shipped in many enterprisy software at those time.
., and BIND. NTP, Sendmail. They are all opensource and predates that.
But yeah imo you're closer to right than not, though Microsoft licenses were still fairly expensive.
Commercial access to Unix source was still many thousands of dollars, the whole SCO debacle was an attempt to stop free OSs from being a thing
Many of us who had grown up from the mainframe era wanted to write compilers, work on OS's etc etc it was a hard thing to do (esp. outside the US) before the late 80s, cheap commodity hardware let a thousand flowers bloom
If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.
(2) You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.
There’s nothing I’m seeing in the text as it is written that suggests this to be the case. There are just a lot of comments I see that amount to: “I don’t like this,” which can be an interesting signal by itself but not if users refuse to elaborate on it, which is what I (erroneously) thought was happening here.
> You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.
I did miss it, sorry. I clicked through and didn’t notice that the top comment was yours. I assumed you were just linking to a past discussion.
I’m sure you already know this, but on the off chance you don’t, you can click on a comment’s timestamp to get a permalink to the specific comment, like this:
But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated with me too if I just said "CATB is bad!" and left it at that.