What strikes me the most, while reading through that thread, is how many times I saw the phrase "I didn't read the book that defined the terms "cathedral" and "bazaar", but cathedral/bazaar is..." Or something equivalent. The author kept asking if the people commenting read the book.
Why the downvote? Is discussion of a previous discussion too meta or otherwise off topic?
The terms cathedral/bazaar do have meaning in the community beyond the specific definition in that book. Worse, without some historical hesitation, using that specific definition now, 14 years later, is to ignore the influence of that book on the larger discourse on the topic. (Compare it to the Bible: interpreting it as is without taking into account the 2000+ years of history and cultural evolution is non-sense [although popular in certain circles])
Thanks, this was very helpful getting more of an idea of what he was talking about. More I read the more I realized I didn't actually understand what it was he meant. I should have known, it happens with my own writing all the time.