Shirky: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow?

cshirky writes "A persistent criticism of open source is that it is more about copying features than creating new ones. While this criticism is overblown, the literature of open source is richer on the subject of debugging than design. I've written an article about Ben Hammersley's LazyWeb.org, wondering whether open source methods plus RSS distribution can do for feature requests what open source already does for bug fixes, namely parallelize the problem in ways not available to closed source development methods."

Comments

Re:Feedback from real end users lacking in OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

end users?

like who?

feedback from:

my grandmother - "dios mio! thees computer ees da work of SATAN!!!"

my boss - "well if my roi can't leverage my surplused free fall in time we'll need a paradigm shift...and can you make my icons bigger?"

my brother - "dude can you get me free movies"

my friends - "it was like beep beep beep...mmmm?"

the secretary - "can you help me with my word...i can't make these bullets go away...."

50 year old but dangerous - "i have this usb 2.0 device, but my current usb 1.0 card won't work with it...do you think my 486 - i added the co-proccessor myself, will work with this pci usb 2.0 card?"

my tax preparer - "you mean i don't have to double click on EVERYTHING?"

my dad - "i hate that dell kid"

Re:They don't know where to go stoopid

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'd be SOL with propriatory if you wanted the answer yesterday...

Re:How about this?

[Ace Rimmer]

Great idea! I'm going to implement it in my daemon right now. Oh, wait...