5 ms·
The article makes a good point but I wonder if it is an incomplete explanation. What would happen if Linus Torvalds walked away and there was no single leader t
by davidst 9y ago
The article makes a good point but I wonder if it is an incomplete explanation. What would happen if Linus Torvalds walked away and there was no single leader to guide (or "dictate", depending on your point of view) its development? Would it begin to fragment and exhibit signs of Conway's Law?
I believe the answer is, yes, it would. While Linus is a stubborn and opinionated leader ("Benevolent Dictator For Life") it is those qualities, coupled with his extremely high standards, that have preserved the coherence of Linux's system architecture all this time.
- pmoriarty 9y agoI wonder if there are any large, successful open source projects that are leaderless and function well without a social hierarchy? If non-hierarchical social structures are really more effective, such examples should be easy to find, no? On the other hand, maybe their absence only indicates that online communities simply tend to mirror the social structures of offline communities, or that they're just mostly made up of people who prefer hierarchies.
- dTal 9y agoExtremely relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne... tl;dr - hierarchies will form whether you want them to or not. If you refuse to endorse an official structure, you'll simply get an unofficial (and more often than not, unaccountable) one instead.