Producing Open Source Software

Chapter 3. Technical Infrastructure

Free software projects rely on technologies that support the selective capture and integration of information. The more skilled you are at using these technologies, and at persuading others to use them, the more successful your project will be. This only becomes more true as the project grows. Good information management is what prevents open source projects from collapsing under the weight of Brooks’ Law,^[1] which states that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Fred Brooks observed that the complexity of a project increases as the square of the number of participants. When only a few people are involved, everyone can easily talk to everyone else, but when hundreds of people are involved, it is no longer possible for each person to remain constantly aware of what everyone else is doing. If good free software project management is about making everyone feel like they’re all working together in the same room, the obvious question is: what happens when everyone in a crowded room tries to talk at once?

This problem is not new. In non-metaphorical crowded rooms, the solution is parliamentary procedure: formal guidelines for how to have real-time discussions in large groups, how to make sure important dissents are not lost in floods of “me-too” comments, how to form subcommittees, how to recognize when decisions are made, etc. An important part of parliamentary procedure is specifying how the group interacts with its information ...