eWeek: Open-Source Virtues

“It’s easy to think of source code as a product. Energetic and
skillful people go into a room; tired people and lines of code come
out. People routinely measure and even agonize over the lines of
code produced per unit of programmer effort or calendar time. They
truly seem to feel that writing more code means getting more
done.

“That’s an error that has always led to bad decisions, but in
the era of open-source software, it merely paves the way for a more
serious mistake. People start from the mistaken viewpoint of source
code as product and follow a logical path to this flawed belief:
that the worth of an open-source software effort is measured by the
amount of code that it puts on display…”

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