The Cathedral and the Bazaar (and Quakers)

As some of you will be aware, I’ve put a fair bit of time in my life into software development – I’ve earned a living doing it, I’ve studied it formally, I’ve done it as a hobby. Some of this has been connected, to a variable extent, to the ‘free and open source software’ community, as much a social movement as a software development model, in which the source code of software is available, anyone can modify it, and there’s no restrictions in how you use it. This approach has given us Linux, which I imagine almost all of you have heard of, as well as office productivity packages like LibreOffice and OpenOffice, and specialist software like the database systems MySQL and PostgreSQL or the statistical software package R.

One of the great figures of the philosophy of free and open source software, Eric S. Raymond, wrote a famous essay about different approaches to open source development. Originally presented at a conference for Linux developers in 1997, and later published in a collection bearing the same title in 1999 (the book is still evolving, and available free on his website). That essay, and book, is called The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It talks about two models, the cathedral model and the bazaar model, that broadly describe the way most open source projects had been developed up to that point. So, what does this have to do with religion, what does it have to do with Quakers? Some of you might have a guess already, but read on – through some more about software development – and all will become clear.

Reflection on ‘Maxim 5’ (Each of Us Dies)

“Each of us dies with our work incomplete.”
–Maxim 5

Some people have told me that they find this very short ministry depressing. I guess I can see that. On the other hand, it’s a bit like “things are always in the last place you look”, or “a letter always reaches its destination”. Not as much of an absolute tautology as those, in that one doesn’t generally look anywhere else for something once they’ve found it (and no-one says it can’t also be in the first place you look), and wherever a letter arrives is, by definition, its destination (even if it isn’t the intended destination).

No, this one is, to me, extremely simple in essence and very complex in implication. The essence is simply this: there is always more we might have done. Every life that ends is a loss of someone who could contribute, albeit some of that loss may have occurred earlier than the point of death in the case of senescence or degenerative and/or progressive illnesses. Whatever you do, whatever amazing work you have done, you could always have done more.