As you point out in your linked comment, the original essay captured the zeitgeist of the time. It also influenced and inspired many people. From that perspective, it's hard for me to agree that it was bad. However, I don't think the content was original at the time (perhaps that's what you mean by bad?) - in the sense that ESR wasn't out ahead of people blazing some new trail and it also didn't hold up very well factually.

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Taniwha 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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jaredklewis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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LevGoldstein 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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duskwuff 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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queenkjuul 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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sethev 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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tptacek 4 hours ago | parent [-]

FreeBSD 2.0 was 1994.

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sethev 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.)

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tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It was certainly influential. It's just bad on its own merits.

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bawolff 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I guess it depends on what you think the goal of the essay was. I always felt like the primary goal was to inspire people and a lot of the software engineering parts were more framing. To me it reads as a manifesto disguised as a software engineering essay.

If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.

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lurk2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-]

(1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents). It isn't a general prohibition on critique, which would be silly.

(2) You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.

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lurk2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> (1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents).

There’s nothing I’m seeing in the text as it is written that suggests this to be the case. There are just a lot of comments I see that amount to: “I don’t like this,” which can be an interesting signal by itself but not if users refuse to elaborate on it, which is what I (erroneously) thought was happening here.

> You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.

I did miss it, sorry. I clicked through and didn’t notice that the top comment was yours. I assumed you were just linking to a past discussion.

I’m sure you already know this, but on the off chance you don’t, you can click on a comment’s timestamp to get a permalink to the specific comment, like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940773

	▲	tptacek 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		HN is a common law system; the real guidelines are the guidelines page itself, and the "jurisprudence" of years and years of Dan (and Tom) writing moderator comments. But you also know you're a little off the rails when you've derived a rule that would prohibit, say, criticism of a book --- "Teach Yourself C In 24 Hours is a bad book". Of course that's OK! But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated with me too if I just said "CATB is bad!" and left it at that.