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Virtual Decentralized Networks: Linux's Organization

Posted by michael on from the xchat-and-pine dept.

barries writes: "Here is an interesting take on the Linux Project which tries to put it in a historical perspective and explain why traditional structures and theory don't fully apply to it. It overlooks a few things but gets most of the basics right." You might want to skip ahead a bit in the paper to get to the Linux-specific sections.

3 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Defies Brook's Law? by robbyjo · · Score: 3, Informative

    It defies Brook's Law because of its parallel release structure, extreme modularity, "trusted lieutenants" structure and as a consequence, co-ordination costs are almost negligible.

    IIRC, Brook's law applies for networked communication. Hierarchical communication is therefore created to reduce this overhead. Extreme modularity doesn't prevent the merging cost. The interesting note here is that this paper doesn't address who is behind the scene to put all of this together.

    I am not a Linux developer, but I believe Linus is the ruler of all of them. If he doesn't like the way things integrated, he just demote the component. Thus the maintainer does the job to comply. Recall on how many "new" components, such as ext3 and others must wait and comply to this rule? The rule is pretty rigid and widely accepted by all developers. All his "lieutenants", such as Alan Cox, also applies the same rule.

    Moreover, Linux developers are all dedicated people, not just people that wants money to do their work. They want recognition. So, they will try very hard to push their "product" into the development line.

    It's not just the Brook's Law, I suppose... Anyway, that's my 2c.

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  2. Re:GNU/Linux by mabinogi · · Score: 2, Informative

    Things like this can really distract a reader, ya know?

    I don't know why, 'cause it IS actually true...

    also, the official name for the Debian Linux distribution is Debian GNU/Linux.

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  3. This is somebody's term paper by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative
    Read the last lines:
    • "About the Author: George N. Dafermos has just completed a masters' programme in Management at Durham Business School and is currently continuing his postgraduate studies in E-Commerce at the David Goldman Informatics Centre in the U.K."

    "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the "Halloween Memo" have covered this ground, and better.

    There are major unanswered questions to ask about "open source" as a process, but this paper doesn't ask them.