I’m never getting accustomed to the fact that there’s now an entire generation of coders who have never seen a world where "everything" is open-source and developed in the bazaar style (are people these days even aware of the metaphor or Raymond’s book?), a world in which the frigging Microsoft is a major OSS vendor and in charge of facilitating most of the open-source programming on the planet. Try explaining that to a time traveler from the late 90.
(Also, as a sibling comment implied, the archetypal "bazaars", like the Linux kernel project, now appear quite cathedral-like in conparison to the free-for-all GitHub model!)
> there’s now an entire generation of coders who have never seen a world where "everything" is open-source and developed in the bazaar style
(Sorry, accidentally negated my meaning there, what I meant is that they have only seen this current world. Or never seen a world where it isn't the case, to use a confusing double negation.)
I think that was a natural outcome of cheaper merges/conflict resolution in distributed version control. It became easier so there were more situations where it made sense.
Now LLM spam has made it harder, so now there are fewer situations where it makes sense, and projects are switching to a cathedral model.
I’m confused, when has “everything” been a bazaar, and when did that cease to be?
of course not literally 'everything', but as someone that grew up in a post-git world, with github as the 'default', to me projects that don't accept (or expect!) outside contributions have been the exception; definitely aware of notable examples (sqlite? some web servers, a few internal-libraries-that-outsiders-use?) but very much used to the bazaar
i think the claim is that more projects are locking up contribution paths ~currently
Umm, I missed a negation there, sorry. I meant that the newest generation has only seen a world where there's a giant OSS ecosystem and the bazaar style is the norm for all of your tool and library needs.
Okay that makes way more sense. It seems especially applicable to web frontend, where everything seems to have been developed out in the open.