--- On Tue, 8/18/09, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> it was an overt reference to one of the touchstone
> publications behind the "free software" movement, esr's The
> Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was a pointed jab at those who
> claim that less buggy code was not hailed as the primary
> social benefit of free and open source software development
> models. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" was
> coined by Linus Torvalds himself for christ sake. this is
[WS:] I am not very familiar with software engineering or literature on that subject, but I do have some familiarity with the topic of the organization of industry and economy. The argument pitting a group of independent agents vs managed organization is pretty much standard stuff in institutional economics and organizational sociology - so I interpreted the metaphor of Cathedral and Bazaar in that light.
AFAICT, the argument is not free of ideological connotations, and the Left (or at least the traditional Left) opted for managed organization (aka planned economy) rather than independent agents (aka free market.) But ideological preferences aside, arguments have been made to demonstrate superior efficiency of the managed organization over independent agents. Among them:
(i) managed organizations save transaction costs needed in a free agents system (it is the herding cats thing) (ii) managed organizations allow better allocation of resources to strategically important areas (e.g. solving social problems instead of producing gadgets) (iii) managed organizations are better positioned to make investments, which in turn improves the quality of final product (iv) managed organizations are better equipped to neutralize fluctuations of the market (eg. shortages, price fluctuations, etc.) and their negative social effects (inflation.)
I would imagine that these arguments apply to the production of computer code as well. That is, everything else being equal, a managed organization can produce an overall better code and do it faster than a group of independent programmers working as they please.
The fact that someone would argue to the contrary puzzles me - hence my suspicion of ideological preferences. Is there anything I am missing?
BTW, this issue is separate from the ownership of the code. I believe that public ownership of the computer code (or at least OS) offers superior efficiency over private ownership for the same reason as public ownership of roadways is more efficient for the economy than private ownership.
Wojtek