> Open-source development methodologies have been more efficient > in combining these two programming skills, on the basis that it > allows more developers with different talents to cooperate.
Not necessarily.
The commercial GUI environments are currently far ahead of open source ones in terms of maturity. While Gnome, KDE, etc... are just now starting to provide a foundation comparable to Windows 9x, the next generation of Mac and Windoze GUIs are going to incorporate 2d (ala Postscript/PDF) and 3d transform features + alpha blending into their display models. If these prove to be productivity enhancing, then open source desktops are going to have to play massive catch-up once again.
Also, the slow appearance of high level widgets for the Gtk platform is proof that development, in this area at least, is slower for the open source paradigm than it is for commercial ones.
But one hypothesis of mine is that the pace and kind of activity surrounding the OS development paradigm might allow for better factoring / API-design because there is more Darwinism involved in such development compared to commercial ones.
So solutions might take longer to flower, but the end-result could be superior to those emanating from commercial efforts whose direction is driven by relatively shorter-term goals. This is part of why we should be interested in making sure that the commercially-sponsored OS projects should still reflect 'community' rather than company-centric goals.
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