[Taniwha]

Yeah, it's worth remembering that at the time a compiler cost $10k+, an OS $1000s/year - you couldn't work on OS or compiler work unless you worked for a big hardware company - a whole lot of interesting work was locked away from most programmers

[jaredklewis]

Wasn’t Cathedral and the Bazaar originally published in 1999? Who was paying thousands of dollars a year for an OS in 199? And I think GCC was already widespread by then, no?

I didn’t start programming until a few years later, but for sure by 2002, it seemed to me a given that compilers were free. It was my impression that stuff like Borland was niche and that serious stuff like Java and C were free.

Not saying you are wrong, just your comment surprised me. Maybe I have a revisionist memory or maybe those intervening 3 years were quite transformational in the industry.

[tptacek]

The firm I was at in 1997 was shipping commercial software with GCC. There were expensive compilers, but you weren't required to use them. For Windows builds, I think we were Borland C++, which was hundreds of dollars. Sun had a pretty expensive compiler for Solaris that I remember using for hunting down memory leaks.

[Taniwha]

Yes but Cathedral and the Bazaar was telling us that the world had changed, gcc was free, linux was a thing etc, mainframes (where compilers cost $10k and you (mostly) couldn't bring your own OS) were being replaced by workstations etc.

Commercial access to Unix source was still many thousands of dollars, the whole SCO debacle was an attempt to stop free OSs from being a thing

Many of us who had grown up from the mainframe era wanted to write compilers, work on OS's etc etc it was a hard thing to do (esp. outside the US) before the late 80s, cheap commodity hardware let a thousand flowers bloom

[queenkjuul]

Apple was giving away a C compiler by 1999 afaik, GCC was well established (but going through the egcs drama?). Visual Studio/Visual C++ didn't get a free version until 2005 though.

But yeah imo you're closer to right than not, though Microsoft licenses were still fairly expensive.

[duskwuff]

2002 was before the tipping point, IMO. Open-source software existed, but wasn't always taken seriously. Linux was still widely perceived as being a hobbyist OS unsuitable for "real" applications. A lot of the Internet still ran on Windows and commercial UNIX servers.

[tptacek]

By 2002 I was at Arbor Networks, shipping security software to tier-1 ISPs, and if we'd shipped it on a commercial Unix (let alone Windows) people would have looked at us like we had 2 heads. The writing was on the wall by end of the first dot com boom.

[scooke]

In 2003 I was somewhere south of Fort Worth, TX, having visited Dinosaur World, and shortly after leaving we stopped at a cafe that had three computers out which you could use. I looked at them while waiting for the coffee and they just seemed off, strange. It wasn't OS 9 nor X, it wasn't Windows... What was it? As I went over to look it hit me - holy cow, those are running that linux thing I've heard about! Their desktops were beautiful, totally different than the others. I knew then I wanted that.

[pjmlp]

We on the other hand were shipping software on Aix, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows NT/2000.

As MSFT partner, we also started our voyage to port the GUI frontends into the newly introduced .NET.

We used Red-Hat Linux internally for our CVS server, MP3 music shares and Quake lan parties.

That is how seriously we look at Linux in 2002.

[j16sdiz]

> wasn't always taken seriously.

Does Perl and Apache (as in httpd, not the foundation) counts?

They are shipped in many enterprisy software at those time.

., and BIND. NTP, Sendmail. They are all opensource and predates that.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, but the whole point was about GNU, and not so much UNIX culture, which was been free since the early days, given that AT&T could only charge a symbolic price for the tapes.

[LevGoldstein]

I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k.

Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.

[sethev]

Yes, that is the context in which I first read it (likely around 1999 when it appeared on slashdot), as a senior in high school with no access to the tools used by most professional programmers at the time.

[tptacek]

FreeBSD 2.0 was 1994.

[sethev]

Yes, I'm speaking about my experience as I remember it - not what was objectively possible for someone with the right resources and knowledge at the time :)

[tptacek]

Right, I'm not so much pushing back on you as I am establishing a chronology for CATB. Ordinary people were absolutely belting out (what we would now call) open source software by the time it was written.

(That's not the biggest flaw in the essay, of course. It made predictions, some of which turned out to be comically wrong. The true parts of it weren't new, and the new parts of it weren't true.)