[colug-432] Learn How To Scratch Your Own Itch

[Rob Funk]

Jim Wildman wrote:

> The CatB was very useful to me in explaining open source to corporate
> types (not that I gave it to them directly).  And I always took it as
> aruging FOR the GNU style (bazaar) of development.

That's what was always funny to me about it - To him at that time, the
"Cathedral" was GNU throwing a tarball over a huge wall occasionally,
and the "Bazaar" was stuff like fetchmail.... which had a development
mailing list and threw a tarball over a smaller wall more often. It
was only after CatB was written that the Cathedral idea was repurposed
to reference corporate development instead of GNU.

Also notable about the circumstances surrounding his "Bazaar":
Fetchmail never had a public code repository until after ESR got bored
with it and sent his RCS history over to me and Matthias Andree in the
mid-2000s. This was in the era when SourceForge was giving everyone
CVS repositories, but lots of projects were switching to Subversion;
if Git was around by then it was only used for Linux. (I did a lot of
work getting infrastructure set up at the time, but Matthias has done
everything since then.)

These days everyone is on Github or similar, so we've gone far beyond
the sort of Bazaar that ESR envisioned two decades ago.


> I'm not sure Eric was ever representative of anyone other than
> himself.  But he does have a way with words and a forceful personality
> (which lead to the problems you mentioned of course).

All true.