It occurred to me while reading your wonderful responses and the articles that OS is a great deal like cooperative learning in schools. I think OS is one big group project.What are the benefits of OS? more ideas, because of interaction... people writing code who have a passion about their work... more creativity and freedom because there aren't "rules" from the cathedral...
What are the benefits of CL? more ideas because of interaction... students become more engaged with the learning process... creativity and new approaches to the work...
It also seems that the drawbacks are also similar. Haven't we all wondered at some point how to best evaluate group work? Who really did what? How do you assign responsibility
to individuals within the group? This sounds a lot like the copyright argument. "Peer Editing" will evaluate the work in OS, but only by looking at the end product and ignoring the individuals.If you were working with a group of people on a specific assignment would you all use each others ideas? Of course! Because you are all working towards the same goal and want to help each other. With the Internet those groups become blurry. They are informal and spread out across the globe.
If we are all one big cooperative group working together won't there be less competition and more productivity? It would be nice, but I am ignoring one major factor here- money. Any ideas on how financing will fit into open source?
Rantings against the cathedral
One of the most valuable things that I see about open source is the possible downfall of the Cathedral.Think about your favorite suite of software. Think about the things that bug you. Are they simple oversights or intentional quirks with a purpose?
Here are some of my annoyances: Why does the "save as html" feature in Word 2000 work perfectly in Internet Explorer, but not in Netscape?
Why can Macs read PC disks but PCs don't read Macs?
Why does the Encarta entry on Gates say he left Harvard to start his open company and Encyclopedia Britannica says he dropped out (there are more difference between the two; a very interesting lesson in bias. I hear the new Encarta dictionary has a picture of Gates but not JFK).
Are these all accidents or carefully planned strategies to weed out the competition? I vote for the second... and hope OS, or something, will control the cathedrals (especially the big
one in Redmond).