We are building a cathedral... sort of.

manu3d

Active Member
Contributor
Architecture
It occurred to me today that we and all contributors to open source projects are modern-day cathedral builders.

I'm Italian originally and as you know we have "a few" churches within our borders, including some really big and important ones. My hometown for example, Pisa, is most famous for its leaning tower, but has a beautiful cathedral beside it, standing there in one form or another since 1063 apparently.

I'm guessing few people admiring these buildings stop for a moment to think about the building process, hundreds of years ago. It turns out that while of course there were plenty of professionals hired for specific jobs requiring proper, professional knowledge, a significant portion of those building the cathedrals were, in fact, inhabitant of the area contributing to their own church in the only way they could: providing their labor when they were free from their day-to-day duties. In short, it was their hobby.

I can't but notice a parallel with many open source projects, where many people professional and not, contribute their time and knowledge for things that can be as small as a utility software or as big as operating systems and enterprise-level platforms.

I guess Terasology is a bit of an in-between, not quite a cathedral but not a tiny shrine in the countryside either. But contributing to it does make me feel somehow connected to those people, hundreds of years ago, doing what they could, when they could, and eventually helping build something beautiful.

Kind regards,

Manu
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
Very cool sentiment!

A mix / in-between seems right. Topic reminds me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond which talks about how software development has gone from the big organized cathedral projects (think Microsoft) to the more lively and messy yet productive bazaar approach (think open source / many small components making up one big thing)

Considering the size of our little project and the many little parts it is made up by we've probably at least got a cathedral-sized bazaar going ... :D
 
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