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September 25, 2020 - January 21, 2021
Sadly, these prophets were without honor in their own company; so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place characterized by developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
he acted with grace and dispatch. I hope I will do as well when it comes my turn.
This belief reinforced the general commitment to a cathedral-building style of development. If the overriding objective was for users to see as few bugs as possible, why then you’d only release a version every six months (or less often), and work like a dog on debugging between releases.
Non-source-aware users tend to report only surface symptoms; they take their environment for granted, so they (a) omit critical background data, and (b) seldom include a reliable recipe for reproducing the bug.
“Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later.
the first thing I did was reorganize and simplify popclient a lot.
If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
most science and engineering and software development isn’t done by original genius, hacker mythology to the contrary.
a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
Beware of pseudo-secrets.
one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style.
it is absolutely critical that the coordinator be able to recognize good design ideas from others.
the problem with being clever and original in software design is that it gets to be a habit — you start reflexively making things cute and complicated when you should be keeping them robust and simple.
internal market in reputation exerts subtle pressure on people not to launch development efforts they’re not competent to follow through on.
In order to build a development community, you need to attract people, interest them in what you’re doing, and keep them happy about the amount of work they’re doing.
start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
if Brooks’s Law were the whole picture Linux would be impossible.
The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which feedback exploring the design space, code contributions, bug-spotting, and other improvements come from from hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people.
— and even if they could be, leadership by coercion would not produce the results we see.
Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
This is not to say that individual vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, I think that the cutting edge of open-source software will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest.
future service value is the key to the economics of software production
The volunteer ethos tends to take care of the “attack” side of resource-marshalling automatically; people bring their own resources to the table.
Thoughtful managers have understood for a long time that if conventional software management’s only function were to convert the least able from a net loss to a marginal win, the game might not be worth the candle.
show that they imply an underlying theory of property rights homologous to the Lockean theory of land tenure.
The pragmatists were loyal not so much to an ideology as to a group of engineering traditions founded on early open-source efforts which predated the FSF.
In a reinforcing development, the pragmatist part of the culture was itself becoming polycentric by the mid-1990s.
If one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing, leadership ability, or other good qualities, it becomes much easier to persuade other people that they will gain by association with you.
Most gift cultures are compromised — either by exchange-economy relationships such as trade in luxury goods, or by command-economy relationships such as family or clan groupings.
The classic “category killer” example is GNU Emacs; its variants fill the ecological niche for a fully-programmable editor so completely that no competitor has gotten much beyond the one-man project stage since the early 1980s.
there is, game over and everybody wins. If there isn’t, it reduces to “Who decides?”.
if you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines.
the goddess Ceridwen owned a great cauldron that would magically produce nourishing food
people have a strong tendency to assume that software has the value characteristics of a typical manufactured good. But both of these assumptions are demonstrably false.
It will quickly become clear that, even given the most inclusive definition of “for sale”, at least 19 in 20 of the salaries offered are being funded strictly by use value (that is, value as an intermediate good). This is our reason for believing that only 5% of the industry is sale-value-driven. Note, however, that the rest of the analysis in this essay is relatively insensitive to this number; if it were 15% or even 20%, the economic consequences would remain essentially the same.
In other words, software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.
In the short run, one can escape this trap by making bug-fix releases pose as new products with a new price attached, but consumers quickly tire of this.
There is another myth, equal and opposite to the factory-model delusion, which often confuses peoples’ thinking about the economics of open-source software. It is that “information wants to be free”
the myth that all information wants to be free is readily exploded by considering the value of information that constitutes a privileged pointer to a rivalrous good — a treasure map, say, or a Swiss bank account number, or a claim on services such as a computer account password.
from two linked problems, one of overuse and another of underprovision. On the demand side, the commons situation encourages a race to the bottom by overuse — what economists call a congested-public-good problem. On the supply side, the commons rewards free-rider behavior — removing or diminishing incentives for individual actors to invest in developing more pasturage.
Part of the answer certainly lies in the fact that using software does not decrease its value.
Part of the answer lies in the fact that people don’t merely need solutions, they need solutions on time. It’s
the payoff from this choice is actually negative (and multiplied by the rapid release tempo characteristic of open-source projects).
I think they explain why the loose, amorphous Linux culture has attracted orders of magnitude more cooperative energy than the more tightly organized and centralized BSD efforts — and why the Free Software Foundation has receded in relative importance as Linux has risen.
Then they realized that they, and Cisco, had a problem.
Conventional business school wisdom has it that core intellectual property like Zope is a company’s crown jewels, never under any circumstances to be given away.
O’Reilly & Associates Inc., publishers of many excellent reference volumes on open-source software, is a good example of an accessorizing company. O’Reilly actually hires and supports well-known open-source hackers (such as Larry Wall and Brian Behlendorf) as a way of building its reputation in its chosen market.
There’s a flip side to this. Economists know that, in general, asymmetric information makes markets work poorly.
of the Mozilla browser was a (successful) maneuver aimed at preventing Microsoft from effectively locking up HTML markup and the HTTP protocol
