A Generation Lost in the Bazaar | Hacker News Reader

A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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30 pointsColinWright12 comments

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PHK makes a thoughtful point. But I don't know where to go from there. What are the alternatives to the Bazaar? We have two cathedral builders (MS & Apple) who have both built very large cathedrals with very tall walls around them. If you want to get in, you have to pay up. And then you have to obey by their rules. And don't even think about watching porn inside the cathedral.

Do we need another cathedral? Or a cleaner bazaar? Or something else entirely? We ought to be careful not to throw out the baby with the (admittedly dirty) bathwater.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8812724

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188

Useful to see those previous discussions - thanks. There are lots of useful points made there, and yet still no concrete suggestions as to how to make progress. Quite a few people agreed there's a problem, some saying it doesn't matter, others believing it's inevitable.

Is it a problem?

If so, can it be fixed?

I suppose there are two discussions ... the low level technical one wrt libraries & static linking. And the high level, philosophical one, about cathedrals vs bazaars...

I have seen this before, and very much enjoy reading it again.

One nit is paint company Mark Williams. is not true. Mark Williams Company was first Mark Williams Chemical company, marketing a drink called Dr. Enuf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Enuf)

EDIT: There is some very lively discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188, some fraction of which is a flame war, but includes some responses from phk himself.

(pre-1990 myself. By an embarrasing margin)

Crops up once in a while. Thesis has some merits but ESR's bazaar is more akin to what is happening in web development today rather than at the OS level. Code reuse is really frequent with many package managers for many frameworks. You can start gluing software projects together with pip, npm, gems or whichever gizmo your stack-of-choice presents you with.

I can make whole products just with pip install and editing settings.py.

I've often wondered what "an order of magnitude" meant exactly.

The author defines it as 100% (larger, in this case). Is that correct?

It's change by 10X, typically.

You're right, that's how he got 10,000% -- 10x and then another 10x . I thought he had done 100% times 100%...

Thanks for the reply.

One order of magnitude is a 10 factor, it can be smaller or large. So, 3 order of magnitude smaller is something 1000 times smaller.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

This was great.

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