Free Software/Economics essay ready for comment - tommorrow.

[Jacques Chester]

And frankly, you have no idea how relieved I am to type
that subject heading.

I have, this hour, finished the last of my graphs. Here's
my general conclusion:

There is no definite conclusion. There are, however, two
surviving possibilities:

* Bazaars break Brooks' Law. Never before seen anywhere that
the Law of Diminishing Returns is taken to apply.

* Bazaars obey Brooks' Law, but their marginal costs rise
very, very slowly. I suspect this is the case.

Directions proposed:

* The study's method be repeated, on a larger project. The
GNOME project's set of data - although large - was not
nearly large enough to derive solid conclusions.

* Some sort of software to automate the gathering of project
metrics would make future research infinitely easier, as well
as assisting projects in auditing their own 'bottlenecks'.

The graphs were highly oscillatory. The Marginal Output, averaged
across the 211 GNOME subprojects, was highly volatile. The Average
Total Output averaged across the subprojects was predictable, with
a sharp "kink" halfway along the curve, which manifests as a huge
downward spike in the MO graph. You'll all get to see them
tommorrow.

What I am going to send is essentially the final draft. It will
have the main body as I hope to submit it, including the discussion
and conclusions. It will also include the completed appendices,
most importantly Appendix III (Caveats) and Appendix IV (Economics
in Free Software).

It will be missing a few diagrams that will be scanned in for
the dead-trees version. These are unessential for the logic in the
essay.

I'd really like to thank everyone who has helped me so far.
In particular, I'd like to thank Michael Zucchi, who helped me
extract the raw data I needed from the GNOME CVS, and I'd
especially like to thank Richard M. Stallman. Whilst Richard
has not provided the bulk of economic commentary, he has
politely and promptly answered all of my pesterings, and pointed
out errors I have made on various Free Software items.

And, of course, I'd like to apologise to license-discuss. In
retrospect, it was an inappropriate forum to post to; and, further,
it led to a mild flamewar that continues to smoulder. It has,
however, produced some excellent postings, some of which have
helped *me* to better understand the community license-discuss
represents.

Thank you all again;

JC.