This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 07 Jan 2008, by Joel Liu.
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07 Jan 08
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In fact the most successful systems that humans have been able to design are ones in which most of the design effort goes into letting the system be able to grow in a fashion that detects and corrects the error, so that the system doesn't come apart. The Internet is a good example of that, because it's something that didn't require any central control and wasn't constructed, the way a clock is constructed. Another good example is the American Constitution, because the people who designed it realized that it would be very difficult to write laws for how people should live 50 years from their time and place, so they wisely made most of the Constitution a way of dealing with error situations that would come up and a way of keeping bad things from propagating. They didn't try to tell people how they should live over the next two centuries.
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The reason our group has been successful is that our whole development system is designed to allow us to late-bind things that we discover along the way, things we would not have to find out along the way if we had a real engineering discipline.
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Anyway, Open Source Software is software done the way science is done, and the code you write is open to scrutiny and criticism and improvement by people you have never met.
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I would say that, temperamentally, I am basically an idealist, which makes me pretty much of a mathematician. Scientists tend to be realists, and engineers pragmatists.
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Creative organizations -- at least the ones I have been in -- were like science in that they have first-level anarchy and second-level controls.
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Science absolutely can't allow dogma -- that's anarchy -- so you have to allow scientists to think and explore and come up with any theory. And then for this thing to work you have to have the second level of stuff which says, okay, now let's debug these ideas. So I would say a very large number of people don't understand how science works.
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