De Marco and Lister's Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (New York; Dorset House, 1987; ISBN 0-932633-05-6) is an underappreciated gem which I was delighted to see Fred Brooks cite in his retrospective. While little of what the authors have to say is directly applicable to the Linux or open-source communities, the authors' insight into the conditions necessary for creative work is acute and worthwhile for anyone attempting to import some of the bazaar model's virtues into a commercial context.
Finally, I must admit that I very nearly called this essay ``The Cathedral and the Agora'', the latter term being the Greek for an open market or public meeting place. The seminal ``agoric systems'' papers by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler, by describing the emergent properties of market-like computational ecologies, helped prepare me to think clearly about analogous phenomena in the open-source culture when Linux rubbed my nose in them five years later. These papers are available on the Web at http://www.agorics.com/agorpapers.html.
Acknowledgements
This essay was improved by conversations with a large number of people who helped debug it. Particular thanks to Jeff Dutky <[email protected]>, who suggested the ``debugging is parallelizable'' formulation, and helped develop the analysis that proceeds from it. Also to Nancy Lebovitz <[email protected]> for her suggestion that I emulate Weinberg by quoting Kropotkin. Perceptive criticisms also came from Joan Eslinger <[email protected]> and Marty Franz <[email protected]> of the General Technics list. Glen Vandenburg <[email protected]> pointeed out the importance of self-selection in contributor populations and suggested the fruitful idea that much development rectifies `bugs of omission'; Daniel Upper <[email protected]> suggested the natural analogies for this. I'm grateful to the members of PLUG, the Philadelphia Linux User's group, for providing the first test audience for the first public version of this essay. Paula Matuszek <[email protected]> enlightened me about the practice of software management. Phil Hudson <[email protected]> reminded me that the social organization of the hacker culture mirrors the organization of its software, and vice-versa. John Buck <[email protected]> pointed out that MATLAB makes an instructive parallel to Emacs. Russell Johnston <[email protected]> brought me to consciousness about some of the mechanisms discussed in ``How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity.'' Finally, Linus Torvalds's comments were helpful and his early endorsement very encouraging.
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