There's a other group besides these: the secret society, who infiltrate the cathedrals, the megachurches and the bazaar. They are quite cultish, but thankfully the "Data Primacy Lodge" is gaining more initiates than the old guard "Order of Objects"

I stalled on Which is an acronym for “Gnu’s not Linux” and can't recover from the spin.

> Big companies will often tithe to these megachurches. Some churches are bigger than others. The Linux Foundation makes hundreds of millions of dollars. Smaller foundations like the Python Software Foundation have to make do with only a few million.

This hides essential detail that would seem to very much weaken the argument. You have the Linux Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation that "make hundreds of millions of dollars", and then everyone else is orders of magnitude smaller. Python might be in third place, for all I know (or maybe it's Apache).

> It shows how most open source projects aren’t some giant megachurch like group. These projects are one person.

> It’s easy to assume everyone else is also a megachurch member, even if they are not. The church members are pretty noisy and get a lot of attention.

I suspect most of those random bazaar vendors would like to have a respectable church-sized building. Or at least a proper stall.

> If you look at modern day open source, it sometimes feels like the megachurch open source is better because they have a nice parking lot, give out donation receipts, and it doesn’t smell like kabobs.

Well, no; it has more to do with the sense that outsiders are taking the bazaar seriously.

If we're working with those metaphors, I think it's useful to read up on how actual, real-life bazaars are operating.

In particular:

> A bazaar or souk is a marketplace consisting of multiple small stalls or shops [...] They are traditionally located in vaulted or covered streets that have doors on each end and served as a city's central marketplace.

> Merchants specialized in each trade were also organized into guilds, which provided support to merchants but also to clients. The exact details of the organizations varied from region to region. Each guild had rules that members were expected to follow, but they were loose enough to allow for competition. Guilds also fulfilled some functions similar to trade unions and were able to negotiate with the government on behalf of merchants or represent their interests when needed.

> Historically, in Islamic cities, the muḥtasib was the official in charge of regulating and policing the bazaar and other aspects of urban life. They monitored things such as weights and measures, pricing, cleanliness, noise, and traffic circulation, as well as being responsible for other issues of public morality. They also investigated complaints about cheating or the quality of goods.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazaar )

So not quite the anarchocapitalist, self-organizing utopia that tech people seem to imagine there - in fact, they have a lot of organization, both between merchants as well as on the bazaar as a whole.

Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.

In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.

With one difference: At least the administrators of real bazaars were public officials with a mandate to keep the market fair - and there was organization among the vendors in form of guilds. With digital marketplaces, the markets themselves are private assets and the administrators are blatantly self-interested. And there doesn't seem to be any kind if higher-order organization across different open source projects, everyone is fighting on their own.

So maybe it would do the open source community good to become more like an actual bazaar.

Kind of offtopic but fun fact I didn't know until recently, the Moldbug definition of Cathedral is based (lol) on the Eric Raymond definition

> "...Microsoft. Who we haven’t mentioned in this story, but they hated Linux more than a toddler hates naps."

A lot of FOSS people think this but it's not really true. It was a thorn in the side of MS executives as a competitor, sure, but I never met anyone in the rank and file that could be bothered to hate Linux. More than a few of my colleagues played with Linux at home in the '00s. I cut my teeth on the commercial UNIXes so there wasn't anything interesting about Linux to me until it had caught up with them around 2010 or so.

"Don't look him up, he's not exactly role model material." I don't admire the ethos of putting people in bad boxes.

The Cathedral metaphor doesn't make any sense since the point of the Cathedral is simultaneously to revere God and to be able to take in as many "unwashed masses" as possible. Only by self-exclusion (explicit external irreverence/scandal) can you be excluded.

The author links to another article of theirs called "Open Source is Bigger Than You Can Imagine," which hinges on the size of the npm registry. npm says "open source" on their landing page, and has an "npm Open Source" section of their policies, which places no restrictions on how you license your npm package (save for a special license to them).

This does seem very bazaar to me, but this would all be deemed Not Open Source by the [cathedral/megachurch?] community, correct? Do people take issue with npm using the term open source?

I like the idea that we moved from cathedrals to megachurches because it explains why everything feels so corporate now. It is easy to forget that the messy bazaar is still underneath all the shiny tools we use.

> History will probably remember him as LTT, “Linus The Torvalds”

This is trolling right?

It was a bad essay at the time and I don't think you can make a good essay by trying to build off it. Adding "megachurch" to the already strained metaphor didn't improve it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35939383