[ Thanks to David for this link.
]
“Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his
colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of
open-source software development, in which a distributed community
of developers produces software source code that is freely
available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They’re finding
that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better
and cheaper than the ‘textbook’ software engineering often used in
corporate settings.“In a series of reports posted online (see
http://www.isr.uci.edu), Scacchi is documenting how open-source
development breaks many of the software engineering rules
formulated during 30 years of academic research. Far from finding
that open-source development is just software engineering poorly
done, Scacchi and colleagues show that it represents a new approach
based on community building and other socio-technical mechanisms
that might benefit traditional software engineering…”