HACKER Q&A
📣 gjvnq

Are there any software or tech “monasteries”?


By monastery I mean a group of people that live and work togheter for some non profit goal.

Example: bunch of programmers who live togheter and write free software because they believe in the ideology of free software.


  👤 holonomically Accepted Answer ✓
The closest thing I can think of is recurse center: https://www.recurse.com/.

👤 FooBarBizBazz
Go to grad school, live as a Ph.D. grad student; then, once you earn that, stay as a postdoc. Never leave.

👤 dusted
On the trip home from every LAN party I've ever been to, I'm always stuck with a wanting to extend experience from "event" to "lifestyle", even if a few hundred people sitting and playing computer games does not exactly qualify as a worthy goal, at least they're together on the same goal. :)

👤 captainredbeard
Not that I know of, but there are plenty of celibate dudes writing software that makes little to no profit!

👤 clownworldclown
It's not a perfect match since they still have clients and such, but the first thing that comes to mind would be Hwaci[0], most known for SQLite[1].

[0]https://www.hwaci.com/ [1]https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html


👤 crate_barre
By monastery I mean a group of people that live and work togheter for some non profit goal.

You just described many startups without users or profit from revenue, minus the whole living together thing (but 8 hours a day is a long time, you are only really away for 5ish hours until you go to sleep).

There’s a reason why startups are put in an ‘incubator’.


👤 mindcrime
I don't know about monasteries, but there was once a First Church of Artificial Intelligence[1]. Sadly(?) it's shut down now.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-i...


👤 jamil7
There are quite a few communes in Germany and I've visited and stayed in one that was centred mostly around salvaging and repairing various things, quite a few people could program there and worked on various open software and hardware projects.

👤 rektide
Definitely a dream of mine.

👤 thinkingemote
Perhaps one of the European free software hackerspaces? Like, SV is capitalist but Berlin is socialist (grossly exaggerated). Perhaps an art collective or squat doing media art would be more accurate.

Generally with some thought, you'd see technology as, well, technology. It's not something spiritual nor negating it but a kind of layer or cloak over.


👤 dt123
Church of Emacs?