A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)
From the OP:<p>&gt; <i>...there is no escaping that the entire dot-com era was a disaster for IT&#x2F;CS in general and for software quality and Unix in particular.</i><p>The dotcom era was almost 20 years ago. The Netscape IPO (1995) is now closer to the IBM PC (1981) than it is to 2017. Yes, a lot of terrible engineering happened during the dotcom boom, and most of it was proprietary code running on old-school Unix servers.<p>If anything, Linux was a pretty solid alternative in those days. Sure, the GUI was a bad joke, and driver support was hit or miss. But if you chose your server hardware well, then Linux would give you years of uptime. Windows fell over several times a week. (Microsoft didn&#x27;t get truly serious about quality and security until sometime around XP SP2, when they finally got sick of malware and buggy drivers.)<p>So in 2017, what does a &quot;bazaar&quot;-style project look like?<p>One modern example of a &quot;bazaar&quot; is Rust. (If you dislike Rust, you can insert plenty of other examples here.) All major design decisions are made through RFCs, after community feedback. There&#x27;s no benevolent dictator, but rather a core team. Several key libraries like &quot;serde&quot; are actually maintained by separate teams. The compiler is released every 6 weeks. And yet, I have absolutely zero complaints about Rust&#x27;s QA. There are plenty of test suites, and no code gets merged to master until those tests pass. To prevent regressions, somebody downloads <i>all public Rust packages</i> from crates.io, compiles them, runs their test suites, and checks for regressions. And so at work, we can upgrade our Rust compilers without fear.<p>Now, to be fair, Rust is not for everybody. Not everybody wants &quot;a better C++ minus the foot guns,&quot; or enjoys references and generic types. But if you <i>do</i> want those things, Rust is a good example of a community-driven project which delivers reliable, well-designed software.<p>And I could point out 20 more modern open source projects with solid design and solid QA. We know how to do this now.<p>And those inexperienced dotcom-era graduates now have houses in the suburbs. They&#x27;re planning how to pay for their kids&#x27; college educations, and more than a few of them have some grey hair.