"Mythical Man-Month" supposedly busted by MIT firm

An anonymous reader writes: We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth of the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done in a month and quadrupling its productivity. This picture shows the interns jammed in like sardines to a tiny room. We've written about them previously, but is this really who you want working on your kernel?

Sign me up!

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

They're selling business critical services.

They're advertising the fact that they couldn't plan their work properly and hired a bunch of people who, in a month's time aren't going to care whether it works or not?

  I know that there's supposed to be "no such thing as bad publicity" but this is ridiculous!

The interns weren't working on the kernel...

[quartertime]

If you read the post, the interns were working on things like business analytics, a management website and new QA tools, not the core product. It sounds like they didn't let the interns touch the kernel.