RFC soon on essay "Does Free Software Production in a Bazaar obey the Law of Diminishing Returns?"

[Miguel de Icaza]

> One interesting implication of Brooks's Law is that as N (the number of
> developers) gets sufficiently large, the cost of management and 
> coordination (which is a function of N^2) ends up exceeding the
> productivity of the developers (which is a function of N) and nobody
> produces anything.  I suppose the developers spend all their time sitting
> in meetings trying to explain Brooks's Law to their boss.
> 
> If we look at the real-world experience of bazaar-style projects, this
> doesn't happen.  Adding more developers, or even more end users, *always*
> benefits the project--if nothing else, they'll find bugs faster.  This
> suggests three possibilities:

I believe the real difference is that in one case you have motivated,
energetic, and entusiastic hackers.

Brooks' stuff probably applies to programmers as being measured as
resources or objects rather than colaborators or friends.

Jesus, I sound like a striking mexican philosophy student.

Miguel.