Bill Joy (Co-founder of Sun) on Open Source

Open source is fine, but it doesn't take a worldwide community to create a great operating system. Look at Ken Thompson creating Unix, Stephen Wolfram writing Mathematica in a summer, James Gosling in his office making Java. Now, there's nothing wrong with letting other people help, but open source doesn't assist the initial creative act. What we need now are great things. I don't need to see the source code. I just want a system that works.

mmmm ... part yes & part no !

Quoting from a posting on my-opensource.org ML

>> Programming teams have >> to be small to be effective. Most of the core work in OSS has been done by >> small teams, and mostly individuals. Look at Perl (Larry Wall), Phyton >> (Guido), TCL, Apache (NCSA team), GIMP (Mattis and Kimball - there was an >> interview one of them were asked if they would do it again, one of them >> said no), Samba (Tridgell and Allison), Linux (Torvalds), etc. Read >> mythical man-months (1970s).

>This is ridiculous! Try saying that on a Linux Kernel ML and see what kind of
>response you get. The truth is, Kar Seng, a successful OSS project usually
>_starts_ with a small group or even one person. But, the power of OSS comes

Precisely my point.

>after the initial release is made. The bazaar _does_ work for precisely the
>examples you wrote above! Hello? Have you been keeping up to date?

No matter what the bazaar says or implies, programming is a highly skilled
systematic process that must be coordinated. OSS works because it attracts
self-motivated programmers. Their own motivation creates high standards in
their work, whereas in a company, the management decides on what u want to
do, but in OSS u decide on what u want to do. Since this is what u want to
do, u obviously must be motivated but necessary the case in a company.

The bazaar implies a process where many equal partners work on a program
simulataneously hammering out pieces of the code. The quote, "many eyeball
make bugs shallow", characterise the process, almost a darwinian
competition.

Creativity IMHO in the Open Source development to a large part is a function of the programmer's own motivation to do something better ! The curiosity to peek beneath the hood of an application, look at the code and see what bug one can fiux and what new function one can get it to perform !

If you ask me if the Bazaar in itself would breed creativity, my answer would be NO ! On the other hand, I would say that Open Source projects land up in the Bazaar,m almost all of them start small (1 or 2 hackers) and then grown to be subsumed to the Bazaar. It is at the nascent genesis stage that creativity comes into the picture in Open source ... after that it is the greater common good that takes precedence !

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