The mythical group of developers that are supposed to descend from the Internet when you open source a project. Prophecy states that their “many eyes will make all bugs shallow”, essentially the Internet-generation’s equivalent of “An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare”.
Too bad none of the (code) monkeys showed up.
The allure of this non-existent group, and its false promises of thousands of developers swooping down and taking your project mainstream, have bamboozled many a CEO. This includes the recently-fired Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
Schwartz believe by opening up projects like Open Office that Sun could defeat Microsoft Office. Like so many before him, you have to imagine he was a little disappointed when the army of coders didn’t magically show up, and 90% of the contributed is still done by the small Open Office core team.
Comments
I’m sure we quoted SJVN on this somewhere. Just in case we didn’t, http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_five_biggest_changes_out_of_sun_oracle.
I was trying to find the point where Stevie was commending Sun on their awesome powers of prediction, and agreeing that Billyuns and Billyuns of Stars would descend upon the code. (That was MySQL. Even Stevie had given up on OOo by then).
Oh well.
One of these days, hopefully, folks will understand that goodwill alone does not a great product make. Or, more likely, every few years we’ll have to deal with newly-indoctrinated “freedom freshmen” who try to make the same crap work all over again.
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