Comment by phkamp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phkamp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was intimately involved in those discussions and decisions.

There seems to be some underlying assumptions of omniperfection hung of the "cathedral" meme in these parts. That is simply unfounded in both theory and practice.

Second, cathedral vs. bazaar is not really about governance, but about architecture, and they are two separate power-structures, although most organizations, including FreeBSD, mingle them, to their own disadvantage.

We can argue if attempting M:N was a wise or a factually based decision, but that has nothing to do with cathedral vs. bazaar, certainly not in this particular case: What happened was that M:N came first and that was that.

Only once it clearly transpired that it could not sustain its promises in practice (partly because every thread programmer assumed 1:1) did the actual decision making aparatus of FreeBSD kick into gear.

In Linux, (which is much more cathedral than FreeBSD) or OpenBSD (at the time even more so), that decision would probably have been executed practically instantly, but in FreeBSD which is mostly consensus driven, it took some time (and angry words etc.)

But overall the libkse vs. libthr saga has almost nothing to do with cathedral vs. bazaar, because architecture was not the driving force at any time during that saga.

I just wanted to quickly point out that you have referred to Linux as "much more cathedral than...". Considering that Linux was the original motivation for "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", identified as "the Bazaar", I highly suspect that you are not using the terms in the same way the original essay intended.

Indeed, throughout this discussion it has become clear that you regard anything with a sense of design and some amount of quality control as a "Cathedral". If you want to discuss the benefits of design and quality control, that's a perfectly fine discussion to have, but it also seems to be completely orthogonal to the original discussion of cathedrals and bazaars, which was wholly focused on the development process.

In fact, I wonder if your arguments would be better focused on the concept of "craftsmanship" (or lack thereof) in programming...keeping in mind, of course, that both cathedral builders and bazaar artisans have historically had a notion of craftsmanship.

ESR seemed to target linux userland and GNU-toolchain/utilities in his description of Linux as a Bazaar, although not to the exclusion of the kernel.

I think it is plausible to describe the kernel as much more Cathedral-like, at least in parts where Linus is very strict about how components should be integrated. I can see where parent could have got this impression.

At the same time, there are parts of kernel that are bazaars. Virtualization/Hypervisor support is the area I'm most familiar with; the various hypervisor vendors basically crammed their paravirt calls and passthrough drivers in, without unifying the interface at all. Yes, Linus and others were very aggressive with maintaining the code quality, but less with the architecture. There are other areas of kernel (particular drivers), where we've seen similar situations.

Thanks for weighing in. I worry about going out on a limb describing FreeBSD in a thread you're a part of. While I'd never assume omniperfection, I expect top-down enforced careful consideration to more often produce correct decisions.

That said, given your response, I think perhaps still don't understand the meaning behind your cathedral/bazaar dichotomy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com