Mob Software

Hell O'World writes: "Wow! Mob Software." A concise submitter, how refreshing. To elaborate: an essay whose author argues that large software projects should be built, well, by a mob.

Comments

Unpredictability in complex systems

[FamousLongAgo]

Someone here wondered a few days ago how an Internet worm might succeed if it were able to mutate and evolve in a Darwinian context. This writer is wondering what software will be like when all code can evolve, and interact, and what that emergent behavior might be like.

It is both a wonderful and frightening thought -- the Internet may already be sufficiently complex for self-replicating, self-modifying code to survive in the wild - and if it isn't, it won't be too long before that becomes possible.

We are all busy wondering if Microsoft and .NET will become a monoculture on the internet -- it would be quite a surprise to suddenly find little XML packets flying around in a language nobody could understand, the fruit of some bright hacker who releases a clever little self replicator, evolving at five generations an hour.

How long would it take for Darwinian code to evolve to the point where we couldn't eradicate it?

I think the biological model is worth paying attention to. A plague wipes out cathedral builders and bazaar merchants alike.

How is it different from "The Bazaar?"

[Rimbo]

Reference: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Isn't this basically just the standard Open-Source development model, but restated with a lot more cool poetry?

Perhaps that's not "Mob Software's" point -- perhaps the whole point is just a romanticization of The Bazaar. I'm cool with that.