I’d just like to thank the author for giving the correct t reason for the Winchester Mystery House instead of just blindly repeating the “she went crazy” line story as truth.
I know. And it’s what I learned from Jack Palace on the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not TV show, where I first heard about it. Because it makes a really good story.
“She was a woman so sexism meant couldn’t be an architect. The only way she could live out her dream was just to build her own house over and over.“ isn’t nearly as fun.
The fact she was afraid of ghosts from people killed by her husband‘s invention just slots in so well as “evidence“. Add a crazy looking house and there you go, perfect tourist trap.
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*.
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
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.
Does anyone have numbers for churn vs. cumulative code?
Most of my commits (hand written and AI) have delete counts that are 75-110% the added line count.
The point that many developers will probably forget to tell the LLM to run cleanup/refactoring paths is probably true though. (I’ve definitely found ghost-chasing bugfixes in all sorts of corners of LLM generated code).
Julia Morgan, Winchester's contemporary, was the first woman to obtain an architecture license in California in 1904 and had a very prolific career throughout the state including her most famous - Hearst Castle - commissioned in 1919.
> Which is why maintainers feel like they’re drowning.
How about actually funding opensource project mantainers? We have non profit orgs, that eat billions of public funds. We spend biilions for influencing hardly measurable metrics, with very nebulous benefits in far distant future.
Direct sponsoring of critical projects would have far better and concrete benefits.
So, I’ve explored AI coding, but my conclusion up to this point has been that it’s interesting, but the code is sometimes a mess, and sometimes it will completely crater the project to the point where you just have to throw it all away and start over. After reading this article, I keep wondering if we’re really being productive or just creating lots of crappy code at machine speeds now. It’s one thing to say that we are using a “security agent,” for example, to ensure the security of the code, but quite another to actually know (or at least strongly believe) that our code is really secure. With all the froth of generating thousands of lines of code, how are we sure? In some sense, my question is whether we’re building a Winchester Mystery House or a house of cards.
>"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture."
That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was sufficiently labyrinthine, and endlessly expanding; to confuse them.
Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.
This is more akin to a programmer consciously obfuscating and expanding a codebase to make it impossible for their angry-users to ever finish auditing it, or to determine its author.
When Apple Lisa managers started requiring weekly line-of-code counts in 1982, Bill Atkinson had just rewritten QuickDraw's region engine with a simpler algorithm that was 6× faster and 2,000 lines shorter, so he submitted -2000 on the form. Management quietly stopped asking him to fill it out.
The movie Winchester, book from a local author (https://www.losaltosonline.com/community/santa-clara-valley-...) and going to the tour itself makes me wonder if Sarah Winchester invites the controversy over why she built the house. What would a rich woman during her time do for fame that outlasts her? Chase crazy architecture ideas if you liked architecture maybe. Make it so the home becomes a public place.
The Winchester house a developer builds is only worth something if it delivers tangible value. The market clearly thinks one way, but plenty of people are still skeptical. The cathedral and bazaar delivered value in different ways, and the need came before the solution.
> Don’t try to sell developers the stuff that’s fun, the stuff they want to build. Sell them the stuff they avoid or don’t want to take responsibility for.
I think a lot of people in devtools could learn from this right now
I don't know if I buy the idea that using the vendor parts as examples given in the article align with the analogy.
Architecture is not that; MEP trades aren't architecture. If she used prefabbed wall assemblies or didn't do her own structural for critical parts the analogy would hold (I so not know if she did or did not either way). Plumbing is a completely separate trade the way trading stocks is separate from computing; it just happens to live in the house.
Does anyone know what “agent tea” is in the second graph? There is a paper about a protocol but it seems a bit obscure to be featured in this context and the other two points on the graph are models.
Before, when code was laboriously produced by hand, sharing it so other people could use it was seen as a gift. Today there is no such incentive. If I pick up some software and find a bug in it or a feature it's missing, I can (have Claude) fix that bug or add that feature, and keep it to myself. Why bother contributing that fix or feature to the world if it's just going to be met with complaints and accusations of it being vibe coded slop? Just as maintainers don't owe me anything, by the rules of the license, if I'm not distributing the binaries, I don't owe the world a public fork of the source code with my changes.
The Winchester mystery house is notable for becoming a public tourist attraction instead of a closed private piece of real estate. How do we evolve the Cathedral and the Bazaar to the modern era? I don't know. I know that my life on my computer is drastically improved by spending an afternoon a week building better tooling for myself, and I realize it's built on top of other's contributions to the world, but at the same time, I don't know how to contribute back under the new regime.
I'm pretty sure that I could consistently spew 1000 lines a day/per commit if it was mostly cut-n-pasting of existing code, that I had complete access to, with some minor variations.
66 comments
>she went crazy”
That's literally what they tell you on the paid tour....
“She was a woman so sexism meant couldn’t be an architect. The only way she could live out her dream was just to build her own house over and over.“ isn’t nearly as fun.
The fact she was afraid of ghosts from people killed by her husband‘s invention just slots in so well as “evidence“. Add a crazy looking house and there you go, perfect tourist trap.
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.
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:
https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/tree/main
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:
https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/LICENSE
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.
https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/src/D.new...
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?
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.)
Pepe Le Pew - We shall flee to Capri!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMnbNTv_D3A
ESR's Creepy Sex Tips For Geeks: How To Be Sexy:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.html
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":
https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/doc/BRAGS...
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.
https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/tree/main/src
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.
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.
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?
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.
Most of my commits (hand written and AI) have delete counts that are 75-110% the added line count.
The point that many developers will probably forget to tell the LLM to run cleanup/refactoring paths is probably true though. (I’ve definitely found ghost-chasing bugfixes in all sorts of corners of LLM generated code).
Julia Morgan, Winchester's contemporary, was the first woman to obtain an architecture license in California in 1904 and had a very prolific career throughout the state including her most famous - Hearst Castle - commissioned in 1919.
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/08/the-truth-about-sallie...
> Which is why maintainers feel like they’re drowning.
How about actually funding opensource project mantainers? We have non profit orgs, that eat billions of public funds. We spend biilions for influencing hardly measurable metrics, with very nebulous benefits in far distant future.
Direct sponsoring of critical projects would have far better and concrete benefits.
>"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture."
That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was sufficiently labyrinthine, and endlessly expanding; to confuse them.
Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.
This is more akin to a programmer consciously obfuscating and expanding a codebase to make it impossible for their angry-users to ever finish auditing it, or to determine its author.
> 1,000 lines of code per commit is ~2 magnitudes higher than what a human programmer writes per day.
Relevant historical context: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
When Apple Lisa managers started requiring weekly line-of-code counts in 1982, Bill Atkinson had just rewritten QuickDraw's region engine with a simpler algorithm that was 6× faster and 2,000 lines shorter, so he submitted -2000 on the form. Management quietly stopped asking him to fill it out.
The Winchester house a developer builds is only worth something if it delivers tangible value. The market clearly thinks one way, but plenty of people are still skeptical. The cathedral and bazaar delivered value in different ways, and the need came before the solution.
>Gary Tan’s personal AI committee gstack is a Winchester Mystery House constructed mostly from Markdown.
Winchester Mystery Potemkin Village.
> Don’t try to sell developers the stuff that’s fun, the stuff they want to build. Sell them the stuff they avoid or don’t want to take responsibility for.
I think a lot of people in devtools could learn from this right now
Architecture is not that; MEP trades aren't architecture. If she used prefabbed wall assemblies or didn't do her own structural for critical parts the analogy would hold (I so not know if she did or did not either way). Plumbing is a completely separate trade the way trading stocks is separate from computing; it just happens to live in the house.
>There is only one source of feedback that moves at the speed of AI-generated code: yourself
Humans are way slower than AI. If you want feedback as fast as AI you are going to need AI for that.
The Winchester mystery house is notable for becoming a public tourist attraction instead of a closed private piece of real estate. How do we evolve the Cathedral and the Bazaar to the modern era? I don't know. I know that my life on my computer is drastically improved by spending an afternoon a week building better tooling for myself, and I realize it's built on top of other's contributions to the world, but at the same time, I don't know how to contribute back under the new regime.