You do realise that's been changing right? Slowly of course, there's no single villain that James Bond could take down, or that a charistmatic leader could get elected could change. The oil tanker has been moving in that direction for decades. There are legions defending the right to run your own software, but it's a continual war of attrition.
The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.
"Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that."
I recently had a realization: I can name Cathedrals, that are 800 years old, and still standing. I can't name a single Bazaar stall more than 50 years old around any Cathedral that's still standing. The Cathedral's builders no doubt bought countless stone and food from the Bazaar, making the Bazaar very useful for building Cathedrals with, but the Bazaar was historically ephemeral.
The very title of the essay predicts failure. The very metaphor for the philosophy was broken from the start. Or, in a twisted accidentally correct way, it was the perfect metaphor for how open-source ends up as Cathedral supplies.
How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained? Go through GitHub's trending repos from 2015. Most are abandoned. The successes transform - GitLab, Linux, Kubernetes, more Cathedral than Bazaar.
Windows NT will be with us longer than systemd and flatpak.
I'm not there yet, but I am perilously close to tipping over into believing that making open source software today is actually doing harm by giving more free labor to an exploitative ecosystem. Instead you should charge for your software and try to build an ecosystem where the customer is the customer and not the product.
I stress today because this was not true pre-SaaS or pre-mobile. FOSS was indeed liberating in the PC and early web eras.
Uhh, all the big ones in common use? GNU’s massive portfolio of software, Linux, multiple BSDs, Apache, Firefox, BusyBox, PHP, Perl, the many lineages of StarOffice, LaTeX, Debian, vim, fish, tmux, I mean this barely scratches the surface. Are you kidding me?
How many startups have failed over the last decade? I would argue that the norm is for any project to eventually cease. Only useful things with an active community (whether that community is for-profit or not) tend to last, until they are no longer valued enough to maintain. This goes for things in the physical world just as it does for software.
However ... the domain of operating systems is subject to weird constraints, and so it's not really appropriate to make some of the observations one might make in other domains. Nevertheless, I thought the point was that we want things to improve via replacement (a "bazaar" model), rather than stand for all time. We don't actually want technology "cathedrals" at all, even if we do appreciate architectural ones.
Did BSD defeat Linux? No. Which BSD is even the right one? BSD's biggest success is living on as the foundation of Apple's Cathedral in XNU, and PlayStation's Cathedral in the PS4 and PS5.
Did Linux stay a bazaar vendor? No - 90% of code has been corporate contributed since 2004. Less than 3% of the Linux Foundation budget goes towards kernel development. Linux is a Cathedral, by every definition, and only exists today because Cathedrals invest in it for collective benefit. It's a Cathedral, run as a Cathedral joint venture, to be abandoned if a better thing for the investing Cathedrals ever came along.
GCC? Being clobbered by Clang. Less relevant every year. Same with GNU coreutils, slowly getting killed by uutils.
Firefox? Firefox only still exists because a Cathedral called Google funds it.
LibreOffice, Apache, PHP, Blender? Professional foundations that get very picky about who is allowed to contribute what. They aren't amateurs and they all depend on Cathedral funding. Blender only got good when it started collecting checks from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Adobe. Blender is a Cathedral funded by Cathedrals.
For me, walking through an old Souq gives me a similar feeling of awe / mortality / insignificance as viewing a cathedral or looking from the Colorado ranch land up to the Rocky Mountains.
Also some cathedrals have remained "Catholic" since their raising, but there are a lot that have changed from Christian to Islamic to Protestant ... both the cathedral and the bazaar's physical buildings are still present from the same era and both are used for their original purpose (marketplace or worship). And both have delibly shaped their regions by being engines of culture, innovation, and power.
I've been in tech and startup culture for over a thousand programmer-years (25-30 normal years). It wasn't dot-com or the crash. It was mobile. The mobile ecosystem has always been user-hostile and built around the exploitation of the customer rather than serving the customer. When the huge mobile wave hit (remember "mobile is the future" being repeated the way political pundits repeat talking points?) the entire industry was bent in that direction.
I'm not sure why this is. It could have been designed and planned, or it could have evolved out of the fact that mobile devices were initially forced to be locked down by cell carriers. I remember how hard it was for Blackberry and Apple to get cell carriers to allow any kind of custom software on a user device. They were desperately terrified of being commoditized the way the Internet has commoditized telcos and cable companies. Maybe the ecosystem, by being forced to start out in a locked-down way, evolved to embrace it. This is known as path-dependence in evolution.
Edit: another factor, I think, is that the Internet had no built in payment system. As a result there was a real scramble to find a way to make it work as a business. I've come to believe that if a business doesn't bake in a viable and honest business model from day zero, it will eventually be forced to adopt a sketchy one. All the companies that have most aggressively followed the "build a giant user base, then monetize" formula have turned to total shit.
Unfortunately it also means giving the key to the Kingdom to a company like Microsoft or Google which are definitely adversaries in my book. Keeping them in check was still possible with full system access.
Even Apple I don't trust. They're always shouting about privacy but they define it purely as privacy from third parties, not themselves.
And they were the first to come up with a plan where your phone would spy on you 24/7.
This type of informal market likely outnumbers cathedrals, especially if you count the ones that evolved into tourist markets, high streets, malls, and central business districts.
I really dislike all the corporate involvement in Linux. I don't believe in win-win with commercial. That was the main reason for my choice though there's other things I like too such as full ZFS support and great documentation.
I remember sites on the early web like Hampster Dance, where monetization happened as an afterthought. But if you have to pay $99 annually and jump through hoops just to get your software even testable on the devices of a large number of consenting users, the vast majority of software is going to be developed by people who seek an ROI on that $99 investment - which wasn't cheap then and isn't cheap now. Hampster Dance doesn't and wouldn't exist as an app, because Hampster Dance isn't made as a business opportunity.
Similarly, outside of a few bright lights like CocoaPods, you don't get an open-source ecosystem for iOS that celebrates people making applications for fun. And Apple doesn't want hobbyist apps on its store, because Apple makes more money when every tap has a chance of being monetized. Killing Flash, too, was part of this strategy.
Apple certainly could have said "developers developers developers" and made its SDK free. But it realized it had an opportunity to change the culture of software in a way where it could profit from having the culture self-select for user-hostility, and it absolutely took that opportunity.
It's not a bad place, the environment we live in. But IMO, if Apple had just made a principled decision years ago to democratize development on its platforms, and embraced this utopian vision of "anyone can become a programmer"... it could have been a much brighter world.
I think a big reason was customers' ignorance. The manufacturers can come up with whatever they want, if no one buys it it does not matter. People accepted locked-down smartphones because they saw them a phones first and foremost. If I recall correctly the iPhone released without any app store, so it was really not that different from a dumb cell phone. If you had offered those same people a desktop PC or laptop that you could not install your own programs on, that had no file explorer, that could barely connect to anything else no one would have bought it. But because they say smart phones as telephones first it flew over their head. How many of the people who are upgrading to Windows 11 now because of lack of security support are still running an outdated smartphone? The phone probably has more sensitive data on it than the PC by now.
People are willing to accept restrictions when they come with newer technology. Why is that? I don't know, I'm just reporting on what I see.