* O' Watermelon * Where Art Thou ?

[EvilGuru]

* And while Eric Raymond makes good points in his analysis he is no Moses at the burning bush delivering gospel from way up high.

He is as close to it as any mortal can achieve. The theories and ideas proposed in the book have been shown to apply and map to real life situations.

Lets take GCC, which is a C/C++/Java/... compiler (and what Linux/Mac/Some Windows users use to compile Warzone). It was a classic example of a Cathedral, hard to get code accepted, often behind closed doors and not really in the open. Sure what they did was good, but the developers were very clear about what they wanted and did not want. A lot of advanced users quickly grew tired of this and wanted a more open project, a free for all if you will.

So they forked, producing EGCS. The open development model (bazaar) soon showed its strength and after a couple of years was so much further on than the GCC project that it was 'renamed' and 'blessed' as the official version. I could go on (XFree86 & X.org is another good example), but I shalnt.

One could also argue that the same kind of thing has been shown in the real world, take the split from Rome by Henry VII. Now instead of having to go through the Catholic Church (Cathedral) to obtain enlightenment you could do it from the comforts of your bible and your soul.

This is the main problem with Cathedral development, as soon as you make a release there is a good chance that it will be forked as soon as it is released into the wild. The Cathedral attitude is one of the main problems which newly open-sourced projects face (normally from commercial code bases, or with commercial backing).

In short FOSS can work for some groups & Skunk Works can work just as well for other groups.

I agree there -- in the early stages of development keep things private can often allow for much higher productivity, however as a project gets larger the Skunk Works model just can not scale up, with the lack of red tape preventing evolution (while enhancing creation, however). Warzone is FOSS, and always will be, by the very fact it is released under the GNU GPL. There is no taking that away from it. (Hence why I have been using the terms Cathedral and Bazaar).

As it stands in 2007 I am hard pushed to find an open source product that I use which I can not access the CVS/SVN repository of, that I can not chat to the developers of, and more importantly that I can not submit a patch to.

Regards, Freddie. On a side note I am sorry if any of the religious references in this post offended anyone; I can assure you it was in no way my intention

[Rman Virgil]

---------->

* Bottomline - you do what you enjoy (& masochism applys)...

* There's room for  both approaches, methinks.

* The founding fathers of the USA did not create the Consitution within an open source context & it's scaled-up & endured over 200 years just fine....(the Constitutional Conventions where modeled on "Bazaar" & they failed miserably - it wasn't till we went "Cathedral" that the "Consititution" itself became a reality.) The Supreme Court has a pretty good track record over the long haul as well.

* Ditto the Manhattan Project & NASA that put a man on the Moon in less than a decade from square-one. Ditto the economic engine that drives the global economy & technological advance that affords us this opportunity to chit chat.

* If Eric Reynolds is as close to the "burning bush" for you.... for me it's the likes of Archimedes, Euripides, Aeschylus, the historical Jesus, Buddha, Newton, Leonardo, Socrates, Picasso, Godel, Einstein, Ben Franklin, Michaelangelo, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Sitting Bull, Black Elk, Jane Austin, Ghandi, Martin Luther King & on & on.... Sorry, for me ER is not even within a country mile of that list...

* Let me know when one in your 'Bazaar' Folk Camp get their very  1st nobel prize for ANYTHING - think you be quite a few hundred behind.

- Regards, RV

[Chojun]

I consider myself a very religious person, but all this equating FOSS principles and standards in a religious sense is quite alarming to me (but nonetheless quite unsurprising given my experience with it in the past years).

Religion (generally) has been, and will be, the cause of much injustice in world history.  Knowledge, truth, the pursuit of understanding, and true science, on the other hand ought to be humankind's greatest pursuit.  (not the kind of science that seeks to indoctrinate, such as environmentalism and, I'd say to a certain extent, FOSS).

[EvilGuru]

I think you are quite unfairly comparing software development models with governmental/economic ones (not that I did not do the same).

However, if you look at Nobel prize winners over the years most of them have not been awarded them for work they did in private (some have mind you) but more for discussing their theories in the open with others in the field and sharing ideas. Science (excluding Military applications, where one is forced into silence) is very much a Bazaar. Go into the Chemistry/Physics department of any major university and you will find people on the cutting edge of research willing to talk to anyone who is willing to listen and understand. Or, even better, buy a peer reviewed Journal. I am sure if you fire off an e-mail to any of the authors they will disclose 99% of what they are doing and how it works.

Yes, you get the odd reclusive genius, but many are not. However, since most Nobel prize winners are scientists, and most if asked (and in my recent batch of university interviews I have spoken to a fair few PhDs) would prefer the peer-reviewed bazaar method other the cathedral one. So the bazaar group are several hundred ahead of the cathedral group.

NASA going to the moon is a prime example of when you should switch from a Cathedral model to a Bazaar one. The US went to the moon a few times in the late 60s and early 70s then what? Not a lot. 30 Years down the line it is remembered more for its social impact that its scientific impact. Yes a closed model got us to the moon, but things hardly evolved.

Not keeping those in the know in the loop has cost NASA on several occasions. Take the Challenger 25 disaster, if NASA had listened to those in the scientific community who had good knowledge of the Space Shuttle they would *never* have launched that day at that time.

The Bazaar system does have a flaw, however. It relies on people using their discretion about sharing their opinion on something. With free software this works extremely well, as normally those who do not know about programming/design do not try and influence decisions on the matter. (If I do not know about something I am not going to claim I do just to get my opinion acted upon).

In many social contexts this just does not work -- as everyone (through the media, their own bias or otherwise) has an opinion. This combined with the fact that the volume of a population is so large makes it almost impossible for the bazaar method to be effective. It relies of self-specialisation.

* There's room for  both approaches, methinks.

Agreed. However in the free software context (read: Warzone) there is almost no room for the Cathedral one. Wait a year or so and you will see what I mean.

Regards, Freddie.

[Rman Virgil]

-------->

* k.... this has been genuinely interesting but is taking away from what time I have to spare for the things I love regardless of HOW anyone on the planet might opine about their value or judge thier relevance to my soul & spirit.

* "bazaar" is built on 2 illusions.

* The 1st illusion is what Robert Heinlein termed: "There is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words somewhere along the line Somebody has to pay. You cannot divorce economics from ANY human pastime.

* The 2nd illusion is one of human nature: That self-sacrificing altruistic anonymity is a prime mover in any innovation.

* And let's not forget that WZ itself, as an original creation, was totally "cathedral"...

* Show me an original "bazaar" creation of comprable stature, complexity & originality..... if you can.

* Ultimately, "bazaar" is really a wolf in sheeps clothing.

* Don't take this as an insult but you need to do a lot more research on the human side of science's milestones - your PoV is an ideal that doesnot hold water in the highest echelons of scientific innovation in reality.

* And yes, once released, this ver will be under OSS & likely be modded to no end - but that will only prove the point..... we are after a highly generative creation that will still be relevant 10 years from now.

- regards, rv

[EvilGuru]

* Show me an original "bazaar" creation of comprable stature, complexity & originality..... if you can.

No problem. The Linux Kernel (http://www.kernel.org/ ). Developed complete under the bazaar model (and ESR's initial inspiration for it,) it is ~3 million lines of C and assembly code. It ticks all three boxes:

• Status: Several million users world-wide, used in everything from TiVo's, mobile phones to super-computers
• Complexity: Several million lines of C code, ported to 20+ processor archs
• Originality: One of the first open source operating systems, several cutting edge features. Built completely from scratch (nothing from Bell Labs!).

The Linux kernel makes Warzone (and any other computer game on the market) look pathetic. Although I would argue that in their fields Warzone is as original as the Linux Kernel. Nearly every contribution made has been done so by volunteers, paid nothing, no financial incentive.

There are many other open source projects like this, some like Warzone (released from a commercial code base), others developed from the ground up. But if you are interested, check out: http://www.ohloh.net/ . (The stats for WRP are interesting).

your PoV is an ideal that doesnot hold water in the highest echelons of scientific innovation in reality.

It may not hold in military applications, but otherwise it does hold almost flawlessly. The applications of the latest technology are often proprietary (patents, commercial funding &c). So while a lot of the technology you find in your mobile phone may be patented, most of the foundations on which the technology is based was discovered in the open.

[Rman Virgil]

--------->


* EG, somehow I knew you'd bring up the Linux kernel and think / profess you owe nothing to Bell Labs.

* Fact is that LINUX was in NO way shape or form created whole cloth.

* It rests squarely on the shoulders of Ma Bells Unix.

* If Ma Bell had not created Unix in its "Cathedral"  Research facilities (funded to the tune of Billions of $$) Linux wouldNOT exist. Period.

* Linux is a CLONE of the Unix Kernel....... can anyone refute that ?

* I'm sorry to repeat that your notions of the history of scientific milestone discoveries are flawed. You need to read some primary source biographical materials on the titans of science (& wikipedia articles won't cut it).

* I would recommend starting with Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions....

- RV

[kage]

i expected that someone would bring up linux as well, and i have the strong feeling that you were trying to bait someone into that anyways, rman 

i wouldn't say that linux is at all comparable to warzone at all, in any of your provided metrics (stature, complexity, or originality).  linux, does, however, outdo warzone in all three metrics -- as for originality... "completely revolutionary game in just about every way" was not original, either in concept or implementation.  linux (several years after its inception), was completely original... "whoa, an operating system that was free (as in beer, but if you backwash, you have to let everyone else have a sip) from the very first release, *and* is highly competitive (of course it wasn't at all competitive in the beginning)" -- now that's original; the posix compliance (mostly) bit isn't original... it's just smart.

it's a complete misconception that linux is unix (exactly which unix are you talking about, though? there have been more true unix kernels than either of us can count).  beyond that, "clone" is a misnomer... in genetics, if you try to engineer even... mitochondrial dna to be identical to an extant specimen without putting the reference through analysis, if you get your own code to perform the same behaviors, it's still not going to look anything like the original (clone? ...no).  even within the true unix kernel codebase (and all the branches, variants, and partial rewrite), you'll be hard pressed to pick any kernel and find more than a handful of distinct variants that could be said to be "clones", since binary compatibility wasn't worth $#!^ back then ("wha? commercial software? that's where they sell you the source code, right?"), and thus progress was the driving force.

i'd even assert that, in the beginning, unix was more of a bazaar, while linux started as a cathedral -- linux was started, and for some time (before its initial release, and possibly for some time after), was only written by torvalds.  back in the 60s and 70s, if you were a programmer, then you definitely knew what you were doing (an age when you waited 20 minutes for the fastest complex os to boot, and came back in the morning to see if your code had been compiled/loaded into memory -- you make a mistake, and the day just got blown), and nobody had to look over your shoulder: within the available environment, it was more than likely a bazaar among the project developers... financial support from bell labs really only came after the operating system was already been functional, and "modern bazaar" distribution methods were a practical impossibility at that time (tcp came later).

i'm sure kuhn would be an interesting read, but he was a literary academic -- i'm pretty sure he wasn't ever even slightly associated with bell labs, or unix, and thus at best, he'd be able to provide second hand information.

* If Ma Bell had not created Unix in its "Cathedral"  Research facilities (funded to the tune of Billions of $$) Linux wouldNOT exist. Period.

we can be sure that no current post-unix operating system would be even slightly similar to their hypothetical "had unix not been created" equivalents (including not-even-slightly unix-like operating systems).  "linux" of course would not exist (being that the name is partially a coin on "unix", after which it was inspired, not cloned -- only much later did anyone strive to make it somewhat unix-compatible). that's not to say that linus torvalds would have not worked independently on his own operating system, using something else as a template (it may have instead, for example, been "linax", taking after vax/vms).

[Rman Virgil]

------->

* History Of Unix

* History of Linux

* A Second Look at the Cathedral and Bazaar by Nikolai Bezroukov

* The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

* On Thomas S. Kuhn

* These are good starting points to get a real handle on my end of the conversation. (They can be multiplied exponentially, on and off the net).

* Lastly, by way of a gentle admonition:

* THE TRUE BELIEVER: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

* At this time, I think I can add no more to this conversation but repetition.

- Regards, RV

[EvilGuru]

If one is hell bent on calling the Linux kernel a 'clone' of anything then it would be Minix. Your research forgot probably one of the *most* important sources of all: the initial announcement of Linux (or what would become it) on the Minux mailing list. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os. ... 2cbc5a044b .

To say it is a clone of UNIX really does show that your background reading is either sparse or selective. It would be extremely hard for Linux to be a UNIX clone, as at the time the UNIX sourcecode was not freely available at the time (and Torvalds refused to pay for it). The only UNIX-like OS he had access to was Minix. However, if we postulate that you are correct, the first ever release of Linux was made up of around 10,000 lines of code. It is reasonable to say that these were developed behind closed doors. But after the initial release (and as the mailing list records of the time will show) it became very much a bazaar project. ~3 million lines to 10,000 lines? At best insignificant.

In the same vein without UNIX Warzone as we know it would not exist (I'll leave it up to you to find the link).

But moving on from the Linux kernel I present the K Desktop Environment. Created in the late 90s as an alternative to CDE (which was proprietary) it is now one of the leading desktop environments for UNIX-like operating systems. At 5 million+ lines of OO C++ code it is a major project. Many of its components have been so successful (such as KHTML, the web layout engine) that they have been used in commercial software. (Apple used a version of it in their Safari web browser, and many mobile phone vendors use it for their browsers).

I really could go on like this but the fact of the matter is that all successful free open source software projects have one thing in common. They all use the bazaar model. Some more so than others. The only exception is OpenOffice, which until recently was heavily dominated by Sun (although I am told the situation is improving).

On a side note The True Believer (from the excerpt) seems like an interesting read.

Regards, Freddie.

[Rman Virgil]

-------->

* Dog gone it if I wasn't wrong ..... about having anything new to add....

* Here is 1 ref outta 1,960,000 for linux unix clone

* Guess I'm part of a thoughly misguided multitude.

* Speaking honestly from my heart I wouldn't trade 1 Leonardo Da Vinci for 10 Billion Eric Reynolds.

* So.... I guess it's best for us to agree to disagree.... & move on to whole-cloth creativity (at least, I love making from "thin air" - blank paper, blank canvas, blank music sheet is where I find my "nirvana"..)

* Hope there's no hard feelings Freddie. I appreciate your engagement with these topics & while you haven't convinced me to alter my basic World View, you have spurred me to re-evaluate & even look at stuff I would not have save you raised their significance - so I went exploring.

- Cheers, RV

* Side-note:

* As a whipper-snapper, after graduating from NYU & having worked for 2 years in the microbiology lab at Mount Sinai Hospital (working on infectious disease diagnostics) I decided I wasn't cutout to be a scientist and that I was sick & tired of NYC.

* So I pulled-up stakes & moved to San Francisco to start anew.

* I picked SF for a number of reasons, one of which was my hope of meeting several of my heroes who lived in the area.

* After some 6 months, settled in pretty good, I was walking from my crib in Civic Center to the Main Branch Public Library across from City Hall. Between the structures were park benches, manicured trees, & a fountain that spouted into a pool of water inhabited by mallards & seagulls.

* From the corner of my eye I saw an elderly gent reading a newspaper. He looked familiar, not from personal aquaintence, but from a book jacket photo.

* I walked over and the closer I got the more certain I was that it was one of my heroes.

* "Hello Mr. Hoffer. My name is Frank. May I join you for a few minutes.".

* Graciously he gestured that I sit. We spoke of his book "The True Believer" for hours

[kage]

no, i think it's best for us to agree about one thing... i certainly appreciate esr's software contributions, including the literary stuff, but i wouldn't trade anything for another eric raymond, and indeed, if we had another 10 billion, i'm fairly sure that i would've gotten shot by now 

[EvilGuru]

Hope there's no hard feelings Freddie. I appreciate your engagement with these topics & while you haven't convinced me to alter my basic World View, you have spurred me to re-evaluate & even look at stuff I would not have save you raised their significance - so I went exploring.

Of-course not I have found it as interesting as you have. I am more than happy to agree to disagree. We have shared our views, re-evaluated our own and that is all that matters. The fact we have come to different conclusions is a result of being human and not being clones.

Regards, Freddie.

[Per]

We are running a very transparent show around here. Comments made in real-time while coding are often made on a logged channel for all the world to see, which are sometimes the result of frustration, sometimes lack of sleep, and the result is not always pretty, and not always fair. The closed model of development has the advantage that people who are easily insulted can be insulted behind closed doors, and people who are out to create drama cannot easily dig up what they need.

However, I like transparency, and what Rman Jack calls "blunt honesty", as long as people try their best to remain polite and use common sense. I think in the long run it  pays off. The best way to avoid rumours and mistrust is to be open about what you do and how. On the other hand, I remain rather unimpressed by proclamations, vague promises, or screenshots. I have been in this business long enough to know that there is a vast gulf between projects that look awesome, sound awesome, and projects that finish and actually work.

I hope we can now return to our regular work in making Warzone, of whichever project, awesome again.

[Rman Virgil]

-------->

* Lot of truth in that statement Per, though some is inappropriate from my PoV. (I have the advantage in having played both - only one works for me totally, the other barely.)

* For a "closed" enterprise there is quite a bit of transparency on this end..... save, you all have no real interest in what we've chosen to focus on - ergo, we come full circle to all the reasons for the  divide (a rather long laundry-list).

* What YOU can't do is tinker with it or play with it YET.

* Others can & that's probably irritating for those schooled to the "bazaar gospel".

* As far as working - it does. I don't lie. And I can't be bothered with "illusions" or vacuous "pipe dreams".

* Impressing anybody, let alone any of you WRP kats, is not even in the equation as nano-weight.

* I'm excited about a reality I AM experiencing & look foward to sharing with the community at large in the near future. It's been my WAY in WZ since the begining of 1999 & thru 7 community gathering sites over those years.

* As for  "flimsy proclamations" etc.

* I believe the more bullchit you talk, the more crow & humble-pie you will eat in the end unless you make a habit of skulking back into the woodwork from whence you came with your "tail" tucked snugly between your "cheeky" arse cheeks... hehe.. Skulking has never been my style. I man-up always.

* So let's get on with it.

* We all do have lots of work ahead of us.

* Quite different work, in many respects, but still work nonetheless.

* And the chips will fall were they will with those who play the game now, in the past & those who have yet to discover it.

- RV

*  PS: Can somebody do us all a favor & lock this thread to anymore postings. Thanks.