Yeah, I think it was pretty good. I still don't think anyone has a perfect explanation of open source economics and business yet, so for the time, especially, it was good.

Large chunks of the security field seem to love nothing better than to have something to sneer at, but there's a grain of truth in that phrase too. Remember when that Rails vulnerability came out a while back? It was like blood in the water for the sharks, and a lot of people started looking for more. Critically, yes, they were also the right people to be looking at it, but the influx of people looking brought to light other things, making the whole system more secure.

Raymond helpfully broke the essay up into numbered observations. Try the exercise of going through them and counting:

* Which are shoplifted directly from Brooks or from the early Unix designers (Kernighan and Pike in particular).

* Which are banal results of simply reporting the zeitgeist he was writing in, or, worse, blinkered by a lack of insight into how large-scale closed-source commercial development was already working at the time.

* Which have not been borne out at all; for instance, many eyes making all bugs shallow.

* Which are really sneaky attempts to associate his minor work on fetchmail --- that "abomination before God" --- with major work like Linux.

I don't think the essay holds up. It is effectively written. Raymond is a capable verbal communicator. He can write a coherent sentence. But that's an awfully low bar to clear. In its substance, I think the essay is in fact "not good".

Regarding "Linus's law", you have to do better than observe that random users will find bugs in software and have done so repeatedly for open source software. You have to account for two additional details that Raymond is in no hurry to talk about:

1. The major vulnerabilities in open source software that were hidden in plain sight for years and years and only discovered by commercial security labs.

2. The effectiveness with which the same group of securing security nerds has shaken bugs out of closed source software, most notably that of Microsoft, Raymond's bete noir.

> banal results of simply reporting the zeitgeist he was writing in

I think that's a bit too dismissive: he wrote effectively (as you say) and convincingly about free software in a way that no one else was doing at the time, and for an audience that was not just other hackers. That's pretty good in and of itself, even if he didn't have any brilliant insights.

I get why you say that, but my take is that nobody else was doing it at the time because "open source" had just entered the zeitgeist, and it wasn't Raymond who put it there; it was Linus Torvalds --- which is why Raymond keeps referencing him in ways that make it clear his audience is already familiar.

I am obviously dismissive of Raymond. I think Raymond has been a terrible figurehead for open source. Due to my bias, my reading of "Cathedral" is that Raymond saw Linux getting a huge amount of attention and wrote an essay that is essentially "Me too, I wrote fetchmail".

> I think Raymond has been a terrible figurehead for open source.

I agree with that, but still think CATB was a pretty good paper: I don't think they're two completely exclusive concepts. Along the same lines, I respect some things about RMS and what he's done, and disagree strongly with others. He is also not a very good advocate for open source (err.. free software): perhaps that's why ESR got some traction - he was not great, but better than the others. At least he wasn't opposed to people making money to the point of personally offending them.