Re: Open-Source and programming style

[tmoran@bix.com (Tom Moran)]

>implicit link to the bazar style of
>development. And as I understand it, in this model software
>is not so much designed as, well..., grown, so to speak.
My original question came after contemplating the "Halloween" memo.
  If debugging time costs as much, in both calendar and man-hours, as
design time, and an extra hour of design can prevent multiple hours of
debugging, then clearly more design/less debugging is the reasonable
way to go.  But if you have an environment where design is expensive
and debugging cheap, then less design/more debug seems clearly the
rational tradeoff.  (That is, after all, what Darwin tells us Mother
Nature has been doing, with rather spectacular success.)
  It's also my understanding that the big OSS projects have been in
situation where the spec was already pretty well understood by many
people (eg, Unix, the Ada LRM) rather than needing specs for a
completely new, never been done before, undertaking.  The latter
seems more in need of a very small design team than the former.