Hi folks, I just read "The cathedral and the bazaar" (found a link in
mozilla.org's mission statement) and was struck by how true this is. An
excerpt:
> Another folk
> theorem of software engineering suggests one of them; Conway's Law --
> commonly stated as ``If you have four groups working on a compiler,
> you'll get a 4-pass compiler''. The original statement was more
> general: ``Organizations which design systems are constrained to
> produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of
> these organizations.'' We might put it more succinctly as ``The means
> determine the ends'', or even ``Process becomes product''.
Currently, we have five developers working on five aspects of FreeCard
(any apologies if I omitted anyone, please yell):
- Alain on the web site
- Eric on the editor interface (aka FreeUI)
- Adrian on the voting CGI
- Anthony on NuInterpreter
- Me on the file format (aka XBF)
according to the above statement (which rings true to me) this means we
will get 4 distinct parts. This is no problem, as this is what we intend to
get anyway. But we should keep this in mind in later work. I think Adrian
or Alain already mentioned this before, but here it is pronounced so
clearly that I thought it will surely stay in our memories more readily if
we have this nice eloquent way of saying it.
The problem might already come up with Adrian's CGI and Alain's web site.
I guess you two have already been communicating "behind the scenes" to
ensure the two works fit together. Maybe a little status report might be in
order regarding voting, though.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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'The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...'
