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

[Jacques Chester]

Back to it!

Mark wrote:
>On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Jacques Chester wrote:
>
>> The issue of quadratic paths of communications. It's one of the
>> suggested causes of Brook's Law.
>
>Mathematically, N^2-N is only the number of *two-ended* communication
>paths.  I could see several situations in which what would matter 
would be
>the number of possible *subsets* of the number of developers, which 
would
>be a much scarier 2^N.

It gets hairy and fast. Hello, Chinese Whispers. But on
the other hand, network systems work better than
hierarchical systems in many situations. While they
are not as (apparently) transparent or (apparently)
efficient, they are inherently more effective. Think
market versus command economy, think open source
project versus command-system corporations, think
Bazaar versus Cathedral.

A general lesson that may be learned from Bazaar
projects is that the blurring of Enterprise and
Labour is healthy. Deferral to a Greater Vision is
still necessary, but so is everyone having a chance
to contribute themselves to it.

>One extremely important effect we're not considering is the 
collaborative
>amplification of creativity: when people work on a project together
>instead of breaking it into pieces and taking one piece each, they 
share
>ideas that would otherwise never be implemented.  As someone else 
who's
>name I don't remember said, "If I give you my idea and you give me 
your
>idea, we each have two ideas, and together we have four."  This could 
turn
>out to be an even more significant contributor to bazaar-style 
development
>than the scaleability issue.

Ahhh, now I am reminded of the corpses of the endless
Theory of Knowledge essays I have churned out.

An useful method of classifying laws is to divide them into
"Predictive" and "Descriptive" laws. In short, some laws are
more about How things will behave, some are more about Why
they behave as they do.

Consider Newtonian physics. It is largely "How". It allows
you to fairly accurately predict how an apple will fall
when it falls off of a tree. But as far *why* the apple
falls, it only goes as far as saying "because there is an
attractive force between the apple in the ground".

Enter relativity. Einstein created a set of theories that
gave a "Why" basis to Newton's how. As well as predictive
powers (how much energy in an atom? why, e = mc^2 of
course) it provided a description of spacetime which helped
to explain Why gravity happened.

The Law of Diminishing Returns is a How law. The causes
of the effect are really beyond the scope of this essay
and my own current course of study. Here is a summary of
possible reasons that have been generated *so far* for
free software alone:

* Pixie dust
* Lack of 'target date'
* The drive to produce good code
* Stallmanist ideology
* Creative idea flows

And so on. BTW, "Stallmanist" will be a legit '-ist' word
some day, I'm betting: remember, you saw it here first! :)

The point is that my scope does not cover "Why". If I
were to try and investigate "Whys" I could be at it
forever. Indeed, I *do* nod in the direction of "Whys",
but only in the summary of C&B which I provided.

BTW, ESR, C&B is all over the place. A great speech, but
it took a few readings to get what I wanted from it. Any
chance of a companion paper ("Faces of the Bazaar", say?)
in the future? C&B is to serious attempts at understanding
what the bible is to plain english: technically there
but it takes a few passes to get what is being said.

>> 'Always' is a dangerous word. 'So far' might be a safer bet
>> for now. So far the favoured solution is the Bazaar being a
>
>What I meant was that adding more people will never slow down 
development.

Again - *never*?

>(My interesting observation about Brooks's Law was specifically that 
for
>sufficiently high values of N, the developers will produce *nothing at
>all*.)  The new people might turn out to be totally useless, but the
>additional cost per new person is so small that the free-rider problem 
is
>negligible.  If one out of a hundred people on the project's mailing 
list
>actually contributes anything to the project, the mailing list is 
doing
>its job.

That's an interesting point. It's hard to phrase, so I'll fiddle with
it for the Caveats section.

>The only cases in which this becomes a problem are those in which the 
free
>riders actively interfere with development by, for example, starting 
flame
>wars on the mailing list, spamming the newsgroup, wasting bandwidth on 
the
>FTP site, etc.  In that case, the core development group (once it 
realizes
>it can't restore order) will typically adapt to the situation by 
moving to
>a new mailing list, for example.

*never*, wasn't it?

>> Well, there you go. If I got ESR right, the labour-division
>> thing is handled by independent action and the parallel
>> handling of vertical problems.
>
>I didn't know ESR said that.  I was thinking that in a group that's 
not
>being forced (by a phalanx of whip-cracking PHBs) to build an entire
>project from the ground up, it would be natural to build it in pieces 
that
>communicate with well-defined APIs.

Again, what matters to economics is not the gritty details,
it is the abstracted pattern upon which to reason. To
enumerate and elaborate on the causes is outside my scope.

Anyways, independent action is "hey, this could be done";
parallel problem-solving is Linus' Law: "Given enough
eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

>The *interpersonal* communication paths only exist within each 
subgroup.  
>So if N developers break into M subgroups, they go from N^2 two-ended
>paths to N^2/M paths.  The communication between groups is handled by 
the
>APIs in their respective projects, as well as some higher-level
>coordination through Freshmeat-style shared resources.

Once again, interesting, but outside my scope.

[..]
>> a glimpse of how future society will work. Don't like
>> your government's laws? Space colonies are cheap. Fork
>> off from your current one to a new one.
>
>Or, as Heinlein said, "The best thing about space travel is that it 
made
>it possible to go elsewhere."

*laughs*

Let's not spin a huge SF thread :)

JC.