GNU didn't kick anything off. It was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.
What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball.
Many ideas from The Cathedral & The Bazaar made it into The Lean Startup. The Cathedral development model was more related to waterfall. YC was already chugging along, but you can bet your ass PG was already steeped in the tea.
You are arguing theology about who the cathedral metaphor was aimed at. The primary sources from ESR's own flagship pre-CatB project are public and open to examination.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews (TMNN) was ESR's failed magnum opus, a solo netnews rewrite: long private work, one rough beta, then done. That is the isolated cathedral process CatB later criticised when it was other people's work. The tree from the historic tmnn7-8.tar.Z is here:
Read the LICENSE as evidence, not as law homework: anti-censorship language, FSF distancing, GPL-style terms, and a consulting pitch labeled as an unabashed commercial plug inside the license text:
Then read fascist.c: real filename, FASCIST and COMMUNIST compile switches, suppress/deny and ADM/authorized rules for who may post or read. That is operator gatekeeping in code, not a metaphor.
ESR talks in that LICENSE like the speech police are the enemy. In the same distribution, fascist.c is the speech police: it encodes who may post, who may read, site suppressions, and deny rules off an authorized file. That is not a subtle contradiction. It is the same person packaging a freedom sermon with operator-controlled posting and reading. Calling that anything other than hypocrisy is charity he did not earn.
Stating facts is nice, but the conclusion you're trying to get to is just a tangent about ESR. In 1988. How do you relate this to arguments I made?
> later criticised when it was other people's work
Seems like first-hand learning and applying those lessons to more relatable projects, such as those after 1988? Are we still a society that rewards learning or must all mistakes be worn permanently and shamefully so that the malcontents can endlessly self-validate in their misery?
The authz language is pretty funny. Free speech has always been self-inconsistent. If I may use my free speech to organize a fascist takeover of society, is free speech without limit not potentially a tool of its own destruction? If one is, as ESR is, so concerned with free speech, would there not then be a need for authz? If you argue that controls on free speech are a hypocrisy, isn't that also what a fascist would argue while angling to eliminate barriers to the use of free speech so that they can use it to end free speech?
The license is fun. I'm sure I have equally amusing writings stashed away somewhere. Amid this evidence of early tension, stewing, and ideological turmoil, I do sense within ESR a dissatisfaction with the FSF. Would this not foreshadow that CatB was later aimed at the FSF and that ESR was motivated for a long time and therefore, while he ultimately presented a different message informed by many other developments and a long time to think and refine, all along grappling with an irritation at something deep within the FSF that he could not reconcile with?
Doesn't this continue to argue in a very straight line that CatB was all about the FSF and that the cathedral development model's similarities to corporate waterfall were just incidental?
Speaking of first hand learning and applying those lessons: That's all very well and fine that you're using your free speech to speculate about the motives of ESR and his relationship to RMS, without having actually looked at any of the evidence yourself, but do you know either of them personally, and if so, for how long have you known them, and how often have you interacted?
Have you ever had to sit through ESR yapping at you relentlessly about TMNN in the 1980's? I have, and so have many of my friends from that era. It was all he would talk about at the time. He was notorious for his obsession with proselytizing about TMNN and trying to personally attack and tear down RMS's life's work. (Not to mention ESR's rank bouquet and Pepé Le Pew approach to women.)
And nobody wanted to work with ESR because he was an insufferable narcissist who didn't want to share his code with anyone, who wanted all the glory and bragging rights himself.
All he did was brag and brag like Trump bloviating about how smart he is, dissing all the competing software that was actually free and other people worked on and shared, without ever sharing his own code, or letting "many eyes" review it, over two full years, until he gave up on his TMNN project and never touched or spoke of it again.
There is literally a 365 line 3,135 word 19,560 character file in the TMNN source code called "doc/BRAGSHEET":
ESR's TMNN code wasn't a cathedral, a bazaar, or a mystery house -- it was a shanty town riddled with bugs and security holes far beyond the reach of "many eyes". I analyzed it with Claude: ~774 unsafe string call sites, 42 mktemp races, 61 shell-shaped holes, gets() normalized in a shared header. Review the code yourself if you don't believe me.
Imagine him cornering you at a science fiction convention and having to sit through him reciting that BRAGSHEET file to you again and again. It was his entire personality and discussion topic for two years (besides how much he hated RMS).
ESR's obsession is all about RMS personally, not just the EFF in general. His own TMNN license and my own personal first hand experience proves it. Have you ever discussed it with RMS himself, or even anyone else involved in the Free Software Foundation, or seen both of them interact in person? I have. I still communicate with RMS occasionally -- the last time he emailed me was a couple weeks ago.
I'm speaking from first hand knowledge and direct personal experience over decades. I'm not speculating and hallucinating and trying to carry ESR's water like you are, without knowing either of them personally.
If people actually bothered to look at any of his code, and the reactions of people knowledgeable at the time to his code (and/or his intellectual bloviations), the damage to "open source" would be so thorough that we'd probably all be using Microsoft products for an indefinite period. However, it's far easier to just nod your head and pretend he's very smart (in that reddit sort of way).
Personally, I love reading about people's reactions to the abomination of fetchmail, although my absolute favorite is him yapping with pride that he has code in basically everything -- which is ESRspeak for him writing libgif. Of course, dig down into that and you'll find he didn't write anything... he ported an MSDOS library someone else had written. Many such cases.
That's so wonderful. Glad you got your grievance's about ESR off your chest. Hopefully in the following forty years, you will be able to move on from events from the previous forty years.
It's all still supporting the accuracy of my statement, that CatB was more about the FSF than anything.
Do you have some grievances for me or was damning ESR supposed to make me self-destruct?
Arguably Linux wouldn’t have happened absent GNU although a lot of people I know argue that BSD would have eventually evolved to someplace like where Linux is today in spite of various legal and community factors holding it back.
I used a similarly shaped argument with different nouns to highlight the ambiguity, and now you see why that's problematic. Don't just make blind assertions without linking it back to some concrete, at least arguing that some mechanism was *dominant*.
Mapped to modern concepts I'd say it was about iterating from a MVP.
"Gabriel argued that early Unix and C, developed by Bell Labs, are examples of the worse-is-better design approach." Whereas vibe-coding is not reviewing what code goes in, just judging it by whether it seems to work or not. I guess a common factor would be willingness to compromise on soundness.
It wasnt one thing, gnu is a case of cathedrals. Corps are usually more cathedrally than bazaary because of their hierarchical top down structure, but ymmv, an elon musk or steve jobs company will be more cathedral than a conglomerate like unilever or a google or microsoft
I will not sit here idly as you disparage an entire kingdom of diverse, beautiful, highly efficient, decentralized problem-solvers. Some of my best friends are slime molds.
Not really. From the essay: “I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.”
So the Unix-philosophy small tools that constitute an important part of the GNU project are excluded. Rather, it’s about any programs of significant complexity, like Emacs (and likely GCC) and many commercial products. While the cathedral model doesn’t imply closed source, it implies building “in […] isolation”, rather than in the open. It may or may not remain proprietary and/or closed source.
Linux demonstrated to ESR that complex projects can also be built in the open with many collaborators, and don’t necessarily require the cathedral; which inspired the essay.
What I'm saying "not really" to is the claim that the "cathedral" does only refer to the GNU project and not to proprietary closed source. This is not the case. It refers to certain portions of GNU, as well as to certain segments of proprietary closed source. Neither GNU nor proprietary closed source is a criterion for the "cathedral". The criterion is the size and complexity of the software, independent of whether it is proprietary or not, or closed source or not.
GNU follows the Unix philosophy. ESR wrote The Art of Unix Programming [0] in which he writes extensively about it. GNU was envisioned to be a clone of Unix [1].
> The criterion is the size and complexity of the software
The criterion is the development process, not the complexity. Linux is complex, but not a Cathedral.
I don't want to split hair with your words more. For context, FSF hard liners since the dawn of the OSI were distorting the meaning of CatB to deflect criticism from themselves. FSF supporters also very successfully promoted "FLOSS" instead of bare _OSS, giving lots of later-comers the illusion that "free/libre" was an expansion pack for OSS when OSS came later, a very intentional evolution of the dogmatic "free" software movement.
The choice of "Cathedral" is an extremely obvious symbol when you consider the Protestant reformation as a defiance of Vatican, an overly central system where decisions can only flow from the top. There are a lot of metaphors ESR could have chosen from, but the "cathedral" rhymed with the undertones of the real tension between the many OSS practitioners who have divers motivations and the FSF's plan to slap GNU stickers on every piece of software on Earth while blessing their own cardinals at the FSF Vatican and excommunicating any dissent. Given that kind of very overt signalling, it's just not defensible to argue any other primary target than the FSF and the overly central development process they were dependent on to maintain control over projects.