While we wait to hear from Mark, I note that today's /. brings us yet another round of self-promotion from ESR. In a refreshing bit of honesty he reports a fact relevant to understanding what's going on with baz, Canonical, Red Hat, and other corporate efforts in the free software and open source space:
ESR: > You’ve maybe heard about this “open source” thing? You get > one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it > [....] He ventures into fantasy with the rest of that sentence: > and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in. but a propagandist can be forgiven for overrating the significance of his own work as surely as I can mine. In a recent message I pushed aside a reference made to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", dismissing it merely as a garbage essay. A private correspondent prompted to elaborate further. Since it's relevant to the strategies and tactics I'm railing so self-righteously against, in light of today /. post, I'll reproduce that off-list message here. Private correspondent: > I'm curious about your criticism of the essay. I have both technical and political criticisms. Politically, it has been propagated, waved-around, and put to use by business interests who have a need for uncompensated labor and a need to spin a yarn around the false claims they make about the quality of their products. To the "kids" in the industry, it becomes a bogus received wisdom about their careers and about software engineering practices. Technically: > I've been thinking of > writing up a criticism for some time [....] > Could you clue me in a bit on your criticism? The essay rambles on an on in an unfocused and self-congratulatory way. If you want to write a serious critique of it, a good place to start might be trying to rescue a thesis and argument from it from amongst the detritus. The argument, such as it is, is predicated on the idea that certain programs (e.g., the Linux kernel) have a high quality which needs to be explained -- measuring the quality of software is a controversial topic but if you are willing to take a stand on it you might critique by undermining that predicate. (Of course, any claim that today's GNU/Linux systems are less than stellar is not going to win you many friends in the FOSS developer community.) I think that what the essay most *shows* (anecdotally) is that when lots of people are excited about the opportunity to hack with others over the network, and when there is a paucity of projects to join, through a bit of glad-handing and name recognition you can attract lots of helpers, get an *interesting* code-coverage and portability work-out during "beta" phase, and often collect a lot of patches. In that regard, its popularity among a certain species of business leaders is unsurprising -- I have the impression that ESR is "writing between the lines" to that group with exactly that intent. A corollary of what is shown would be that when there is an abundance of projects to choose from, competition for these helpers heats up. In that situation, one would predict certain businesses to invest more in glad-handing. In historical fact, we've seen not only that but even the meta-level: e.g., Collabnet selling training to other companies about how best to "win friends and influence people" in the developer community. The essay is often *taken* to be about software engineering practices and I suspect it is in that light that you ponder the Cathedral/Bazaar dichotomy. It is not, for the most part, about software engineering. It is more about management of and investment in programmers. Where it tangentially touches on engineering issues it does so shallowly and in ways that undermine any conclusion that there is such a thing as "Bazaar-style Engineering" which leads to good result. E.g., working alone, ESR improved his inherited program by making architectural changes; ESR needed to rework the program in isolation until he felt he understood it from top to bottom; etc. He wanted to launch his experiment with a starting code base he considered to be controlled and extensible and to achieve those aims in the most cost effective way he employed "Cathedral" techniques. Absent from the essay are any metrics or objective arguments that the result of going Bazaar did much more than find a couple of bugs he didn't expect and win him a modest-sized mailing list. There's not much there to poke at which, apart from the political digressions, is why I commented on-list that not much could be said about the garbage essay. Also absent from the essay are any metrics that show how the Bazaar is a sound investment strategy for managers of software projects. The upside (free debugging help, higher quality bug reports) is shown -- but no downside or evaluation of the net. It's hard to say much about such hype other than "It's garbage." -t _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
