The outsourcing part of this piece is a red herring. The situation is... 1) A piece of software that the original company gave up on. 2) A single developer (

The outsourcing part of this piece is a red herring. The situation is... 1) A piece of software that the original company gave up on. 2) A single developer (single point of failure) that knows the software but "went postal" so now the new company has unknown software and no expert. Strongly implied in the story and the advice is that the source code is a mess; the original company gave up on it, and "refactor" is a repeated refrain. The advice is to hire a "good project manager" who will become expert in the software and parcel out pieces of work to hired hands (the outsourcing red herring). OK, we've traded a single point of failure who "went postal" for a new single point of failure, but labeled him "project manager" instead of "key developer." That sounds to me like the same problem, the same failure mode, just a different title on the business card. A further disconnect is the reference to open source as an argument that the "program manager outsourcing the work" methodology espoused will work. The "program manager" methodology as described is centralized control taken to the extreme. Open source is the epitome of decentralized control. That is a major difference in philosophy and methodology.