You are arguing theology about who the cathedral metaphor was aimed at. The primary sources from ESR's own flagship pre-CatB project are public and open to examination.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews (TMNN) was ESR's failed magnum opus, a solo netnews rewrite: long private work, one rough beta, then done. That is the isolated cathedral process CatB later criticised when it was other people's work. The tree from the historic tmnn7-8.tar.Z is here:

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/tree/main

Read the LICENSE as evidence, not as law homework: anti-censorship language, FSF distancing, GPL-style terms, and a consulting pitch labeled as an unabashed commercial plug inside the license text:

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/LICENSE

Then read fascist.c: real filename, FASCIST and COMMUNIST compile switches, suppress/deny and ADM/authorized rules for who may post or read. That is operator gatekeeping in code, not a metaphor.

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/src/D.new...

ESR talks in that LICENSE like the speech police are the enemy. In the same distribution, fascist.c is the speech police: it encodes who may post, who may read, site suppressions, and deny rules off an authorized file. That is not a subtle contradiction. It is the same person packaging a freedom sermon with operator-controlled posting and reading. Calling that anything other than hypocrisy is charity he did not earn.

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House