ZeroMQ

How to Make Really Large Architectures

There are, it has been said (at least by people reading this sentence out loud), two ways to make really large-scale software. Option One is to throw massive amounts of money and problems at empires of smart people, and hope that what emerges is not yet another career killer. If you are building on a lot of experience, have kept your teams solid and are not aiming for technical brilliance, and are furthermore incredibly lucky, it works.

But gambling with hundreds of millions of others’ money isn’t for everyone. For the rest of us who want to build large-scale software, there’s Option Two, which is open source, and more specifically, free software. If you’re asking how the choice of software license is relevant to the scale of the software you build, that’s the right question.

The brilliant and visionary Eben Moglen once said, roughly, that a free software license is the contract on which a community builds. When I heard this, about 10 years ago, the following idea came too: Can we deliberately grow free software communities?

Ten years later, the answer is “yes,” and there is almost a science to it. I say “almost” because we don’t yet have enough evidence of people doing this deliberately with a documented, reproducible process. It is what I’m trying to do with Social Architecture. ØMQ came after Wikidot, after the Digital Standards Organization (Digistan), and after the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (aka the FFII, an NGO that ...