A recent Forbes article exposed squabbling among open-source *NIX versions that would look right at home on Jerry Springer. This is not altogether surprising, given the ego gratification and altruistic ideals involved in open-source development, but it does expose a problem with the genre. The loosely-coupled nature of the developers can make it difficult to create products with a strong, consistent design vision and implementation.

This is hardly surprising. It is always hard to coordinate creative people. There are always more than a few ways to implement an idea, with few objective ways to judge the quality of the result. There will be disagreements whenever people are working together, whether it is within the walls of a company or not. I have seen code that simply didn't work come out of both environments.

There are two ways to avoid this situation. The first is to use design tools like UML that can communicate a consistent vision of the system being designed. This type of rigor can be hard to enforce in an open-source environment, but it really does raise the level of communication.

The second solution is the empowerment of the individual. The best software I have seen is generally written by a single programmer. This is not always because the individual is an uber-programmer, but the simple fact is that it is easier to communicate with yourself than with others.

Larry Mittag