Open Source Projects Manage Themselves? Dream On
“There is one problem with the statement, open source projects manage themselves. It is not true. This article shows open source projects are about as far as you can get from self-organizing. In fact, these projects use strong central control, which is crucial to their success. As evidence, I examine Raymond’s fetchmail project (which is the basis of The Cathedral and the Bazaar ) and Linus Torvalds’s work with Linux. This article describes a clearer way to understand what happens on successful open source projects and suggests limits on the growth of the open source method.”