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.

Back from Unplanned Hiatus

As my regular readers will have noticed, I’ve been a little bit lax in posting of late. So, as I’m finally back on track and ready to get on with somewhat regular posting again, I thought I’d let you know something of why.

My posting schedule had become a bit more infrequent when I started some new work around last November. Unfortunately, the nature of the work means I can’t talk about what it is publicly (and if you know, as some of you will, please don’t you talk about it publicly either). Work that pays solid money is always going to have to take priority, at least until such time as this blog somehow earns me something solid towards my living costs (and slim chance of that, though if you think it deserves it please do consider contributing to my Patreon – the more I’m making there, the more reliable my posting will be). So while that work is variable, I’m going to take all the days I can of it in order to be financially not-in-a-crisis. Having this work is good news, it means my wife and I are a little more secure (though not as secure as we would be if it were a reliable, set amount of work), and that’s great. It does mean other things were under a little more pressure and some things got squeezed out.