Re: Fwd: Wall Street article on a new Cooperative

On 20 Apr 2004, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> "Forrest J. Cavalier III" <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > (You see I tend to discount the "many eyeballs" value of releasing software
> > that ESR writes about.  I've seen too many problems in OSS persist
> > for too long to think there is much measurable value.)
> 
> "Many eyeballs" helps find the problem.  It doesn't generally help fix
> the problem.  Personally, I think that finding the problem does have a
> lot of value.


  As someone who thinks of software as a form of policy
<http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/osw2004.html#software-paralegal>, I
believe the comment from Forest is like saying that Access to Information
laws don't help make governments accountable.  The point isn't to suggest
that AtoI makes governments perfect, it is only to suggest that they
improve things over the alternatives.

  I am surprised that these closed groups of people in this "co-op" are
being discussed in this forum.  It is not the number of developers that
make a project open source, but the ability of a third party to be a user
and to fork the project entirely *outside* of any membership.  
Organizations which allow internal-forks within a closed membership don't
seem relevant to this group, and are largely indistinguishable from
existing "software manufacturing" firms which are internally open.

  Suggesting that this co-op is Open Source is like saying that a
dictatorship that has greater than 20 people in the governing council is
really a democracy.  It isn't a democracy unless citizens outside the
governing council have a vote and a say in the operations and makeup of
the government, not just existing council members.

> Ian
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