I held IT jobs before 1990. Might I make the observation that when a software project is no longer able to be maintained by a single person or dynamic duo, it w

I held IT jobs before 1990. Might I make the observation that when a software project is no longer able to be maintained by a single person or dynamic duo, it will tend to become a bazaar, no matter how cathedral-like it may have been before, and that the alternative is stagnation. I will cite as evidence two of my favorite programs ever: WriteNow (for Macintosh) an excellent early word-processor written entirely in assembler. Unequaled for many years for its combination of stability, raw performance, and ease of use, ultimately it simply could not add new features (let alone make the jump to PowerPC) and died on the vine. HyperCard, which was perhaps one of the most dazzling, innovative, and influential products ever to ship, which pretty much stopped evolving once its original programmer lost interest. Today we have the phenomenon of the incredible version one product, usually developed by one person, which never really makes it to 2.0. These seem very much like cathedrals.