From Poul-Henning Kamp:

That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT “professionals” who wouldn’t recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution.

One of Brooks’s many excellent points is that quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it, and that “somebody” can be no more than one single person—with an exception for a dynamic duo. I am surprised that Brooks does not cite Unix as an example of this claim, since we can pinpoint with almost surgical precision the moment that Unix started to fragment: in the early 1990s when AT&T spun off Unix to commercialize it, thereby robbing it of its architects.

It’s very easy for me to get overly confident in the open source movement and ethos as the only way forward. It’s good to hear a valid counterpoint every once and a while.