When users began sending in
bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first
anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting
software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the success of
the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis:
using the Internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh
scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural
selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model
free of central planning.
What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way
around Brooks' Law. First articulated by Fred P.
Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of
the 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month , Brooks' Law
held that adding developers to a project only resulted
in further project delays. Believing as most hackers
that software, like soup, benefits from a limited
number of cooks, Raymond sensed something revolutionary
at work. In inviting more and more cooks into the
kitchen, Torvalds had actually found away to make the
resulting software better.Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following
quote taken from Brooks' book: Since software
construction is inherently a systems effort-an exercise
in complex interrelationships-communication effort is
great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in
individual task time brought about by partitioning.
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