Stephen Walli has put up the slides to a talk Once a talk given by Brian Behlendorf on OSS Development.
I would have liked to have been there. Behlendorf is deadly accurate about the problems of typical corporate development:
- Slow feedback loops from inception to use.
- High underlying technology churn.
- Poorly documented prior systems and requirements.
- The growing difficulty in estimating work.
- Demotivated developers.
(For that matter, more than a few unsuccessful open source projects have suffered from these problems too.)
Some of the lessons that Behlendorf takes
from open source projects are bound to be
more controversial. He recommends that a
[p]roject should be digital from day one:
start with specs, customer requests, any
initial artifacts in a single, consistantly viewed
space.
What's more, discussions and
decision-making should be moved online as much as possible.
I think this is all to increase transparency. However, I'm not sure if it's not making a virtue of necessity. Big open source projects have developers scattered across the globe — there is no feasible alternative to electronic communications. In an ideal world, they would be better off if they could talk face to face every day.
Nevertheless, I have to respect what Behlendorf has to say. After all, the everything-digital approach clearly works with Apache.