> 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.
I snipped out "these arguments" because I think they are too cut-n-dried: sometimes that's true, but we have examples of the opposite also being true. And we have plenty of failures on both sides; in fact, the vast majority of software produced is a failure. "Managed organizations save transaction costs needed in free agents system" but they accrue *other* kinds of costs like overhead. And on. Whether this is important for the particular example you are looking at is something that Ravi will take you up on later.
> The fact that someone would argue to the contrary puzzles me
> - hence my suspicion of ideological preferences.
It is interesting to me that you would be suspicious of the ideological preference of Free Software but not to it's alternative. Why is closed-source, proprietary software any less ideological?
/jordan