Xarg blog Archive

Interesting post on collective ownership and what has and has not worked for the Apache Jakarta Project by Andy Oliver

community code is a fundemental principal of community-based software development. If the sources are owned by the community and can be changed by the community then progress happens much faster than if each section of code depends on one person.

He talks a lot about the need for trust and respect which I agree with, although I think removing all the author tags from the code is a pretty extreme way to make the point.

I think with the right kinds of tools (an easy way to browse and back out commits, good tests, good notifications, etc) collective ownership is a huge win. That was my motivation in writing the cvs log browser and hopefully at some point with OpenACS our community development tools will be good enough that a dialogue centered on concrete action will be the most natural way to do things (see Sam Ruby and Rael Dornfest and Andy Oliver again for more comments on code, community, and decision making).