On Wednesday, May 2, 2001 at 21:20:47 (-0700) Brad DeLong writes:
> .... Is there
>something specific about software that makes the open-source
>management problem particularly easy? Or can we look forward to the
>development of similar collective freeware intellectual efforts in
>other areas as well?
Software techniques and modern software language features allow you to
decompose problems fairly readily. This decoupling of various parts
allows you to work in common on describing what is to be done by
designing the "interfaces" and then to work in smaller groups on how
to implement the needed functionality described in the various
interfaces. This, coupled with software that is designed to allow
developers to share code and to work concurrently on the same body of
code (this software is usually known as "source code control"
software, a popular example is CVS), makes it relatively easy to do.
An example is the writing of a stopwatch program. You might discuss
what the interface would be like: you need to start it, stop it, get
the elapsed time, etc. So, you'd need three functions to implement
this, and given a bit more info (what the internal data type looks
like and a bit more description), the three functions could be coded
by three developers in three separate source code files that resided
on the same central machine but were shared via the internet through a
version control system.
There are some aspects of this type of work that are difficult,
though: the communication medium is very inefficient compared to
face-to-face interchange. Imagine Crick and Watson sitting on
opposite coasts and trying to work out ideas via e-mail. It can be
quite difficult without face-to-face communication, but you can
compensate by being careful in what you write and learning others'
assumptions, styles, etc.
I might also add that software is written in very highly constrained
languages, so perhaps writing natural language texts would be more
difficult, but perhaps not.
Bill
