The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar

Summary

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral. Except if we look at how things evolved, it wasn’t actually a bazaar. It was a bunch of roadside churches that are now megachurches. But there is still a bazaar, and it’s holding up our modern infrastructure. A short history lesson# Back in the early days there was a person named esr. Don’t look him up, he’s not exactly role model material. He didn’t like some people who called themselves GNU. Which is an acronym for “Gnu’s not Linux”. The GNU project was also started by a person who isn’t role model material. esr was big mad that GNU wouldn’t just take any open source contribution, you had to follow their rules. But in Linux there were no rules!!! Well, except all the rules a person named Linus made up. History will probably remember him as LTT, “Linus The Torvalds”. But anyway, so esr told us not using GNU was cool and we should all just create whatever we wanted. And this mostly happened because it’s what everyone was already doing. There is an obscene amount of open source. Most of it is on GitHub now, which is owned by Microsoft. Who we haven’t mentioned in this story, but they hated Linux more than a toddler hates naps. After being visited by 3 ghosts one evening, they decided to like Linux and open source. It’s a long complex story but it could be summed up as if you can’t beat them, join them. But that’s not important right now. Enter the megachurch# Let’s fast forward to the modern day. The idea of the bazaar isn’t alive and well when we think of most of the open source that survived from the cathedral era. This is what I’m going to call “Megachurch Open Source”. Projects like the Linux Kernel, Python, Apache, even Rust or Node.js aren’t some free for all bazaar ...