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Let's look at what phk had to say about esr's advocacy.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

Pull quote:

"That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution. (Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.)"




I regularly drop that link when I see people talk about FOSS's many eyeballs like they inherently mean something. That said, I recently got to read Cathedral and Bazaar. In that, he made good points esp about parallel debugging. I think the truth is somewhere between their two claims. Plan on trying to figure out the specifics in the future.

I lean more toward PHK given FOSS model has never produced a high assurance system while proprietary and core team models have done many:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/reverse_heart...

Recently I've been redefining the situation to try to find a model that balances the benefits of open-source against the ability to pay a competent team to ensure it's a cathedral. Start of that is here:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...




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