[ Thanks to Bob Grabau for this
link. ]
“An aphorism from some twenty years ago, Brooks’ Law, holds
that adding more programmers to a project only delays it. But if
this is so, what accounts for Linux? Paul Jones gathers
perspectives on the open source development method and whether it
defies conventional wisdom.”
“What a difference open source makes: it appears to break all
the old rules. Or does it? With open source, so we are told, all
the rules of programming, sales, marketing, and customer relations
have to be rewritten. But there is evidence that beneath the
rhetoric of open source, the hard school of experience casts a
shadow on the most optimistic claims for open source software and
open source practices. Do thousands of programmers really stand
ready to write quality code to solve common problems or are there
restraints inherent in development that prohibit scaling up into
world-wide software projects?”
“This little book by Fredrick Brooks, The Mythical Man Month (or
M3 among its most ardent followers), has become a kind of bible for
software developers. Brooks received the Turing Prize, often called
“the Nobel Prize of Computing,” from the Association for Computing
Machinery this year.”