12. For Further Reading
I quoted several bits from Frederick P. Brooks's classic The
Mythical Man-Month because, in many respects, his insights have
yet to be improved upon. I heartily recommend the 25th Anniversary
edition from Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-83595-9), which adds his 1986
``No Silver Bullet'' paper.
The new edition is wrapped up by an invaluable 20-years-later
retrospective in which Brooks forthrightly admits to the few
judgements in the original text which have not stood the test of time.
I first read the retrospective after this paper was substantially
complete, and was surprised to discover that Brooks attributes
bazaar-like practices to Microsoft! (In fact, however, this
attribution turned out to be mistaken. In 1998 we learned from
the
Halloween Documents that Microsoft's internal developer
community is heavily balkanized, with the kind of general source
access needed to support a bazaar not even truly possible.)
Gerald M. Weinberg's The Psychology Of Computer Programming
(New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold 1971) introduced the rather
unfortunately-labeled concept of ``egoless programming''. While he was
nowhere near the first person to realize the futility of the
``principle of command'', he was probably the first to recognize and
argue the point in particular connection with software development.
Richard P. Gabriel, contemplating the Unix culture of the pre-Linux
era, reluctantly argued for the superiority of a primitive bazaar-like
model in his 1989 paper
Lisp: Good News, Bad News, and How To Win
Big. Though dated in some respects, this essay is still rightly
celebrated among Lisp fans (including me). A correspondent reminded
me that the section titled ``Worse Is Better'' reads almost as an
anticipation of Linux. The paper is accessible on the World Wide Web
at
http://www.naggum.no/worse-is-better.html.
De Marco and Lister's Peopleware: Productive Projects and
Teams (New York; Dorset House, 1987; ISBN 0-932633-05-6) is an
underappreciated gem which I was delighted to see Fred Brooks cite in
his retrospective. While little of what the authors have to say is
directly applicable to the Linux or open-source communities, the
authors' insight into the conditions necessary for creative work is
acute and worthwhile for anyone attempting to import some of the
bazaar model's virtues into a commercial context.
Finally, I must admit that I very nearly called this paper ``The
Cathedral and the Agora'', the latter term being the Greek for an open
market or public meeting place. The seminal ``agoric systems'' papers
by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler, by describing the emergent properties
of market-like computational ecologies, helped prepare me to think
clearly about analogous phenomena in the open-source culture when
Linux rubbed my nose in them five years later. These papers are
available on the Web at
http://www.agorics.com/agorpapers.html.