What Corporate Projects Should Learn From OSS 110
Andrew Stellman writes to tell us that an article he co-authored with Jennifer Greene is currently being run at ONLamp. The article takes a look at how the most successful open source projects do a great job of putting important software project management principles in practice, using techniques that can (and should) be adopted by corporate IT project teams.
Re:Great article (Score:1, Informative)
Also, software is not a commodity. A commodity is any homogenous item which may be freely bought and sold. Software is not homogenous. Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera are not homogenous. Open Office and Microsoft Office are not homogenous.
Really people, get a grip.
Re:Great article (Score:2, Informative)
When they say: "The code is better because more eyeballs see it" is also crap, because not that many eyeballs see it, much less understand it.
What really happens is that the few who do delve into the code are more motivated to fix it and to "make it right" than those in the corporate world. Furthermore, the brilliant code will have turned out to have been written by more brilliant coders, and so will be, in that particular instance, better than corporate code.
But let's not delude ourselves. Overall, FOSS code is crap, with 95% of the projects out there being badly architected, badly written, often in an ill-suited language, with poor documentation, etc. These projects, however, die the little death of oblivion, since there aren't enough great coders to go around and do them right.
The key, in my opinion, is the coder. If you have a real wizard who can hunker down and eventually grok the problem, then hunker down some more and design a good solution, then hunker down some more and write some working code, and hunker down some more and publish, publicise, share and handle the spam and flames, then, maybe, you will have a great project in the making. A couple or three more coders, and then traction: the project advances 24/7. Thanks to the coders.
In the corporate world, management is especially reticent to trust the "great coders" and will sap their energy and grokking ability through meetings, unreasonable deadlines, tight budget, and more bureucratic paperwork than the french and british governments combined. Thus, the great coders, the hackers extraordinaires, are either pushed out of corps like a champagne cork popped out on top, or slowly sunk in the morass of mediocrity that ultimately drives them to seek fulfillment in non-work activities (like maybe working on FOSS, or gaming, or god forbid, going to see what those flapping dots are in the big blue room).