Ricardo gave me to read Richard P. Gabriel’s essay Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code. I was blown away! I knew Gabriel’s Worse is Better paper but this is much better.

Side story: I found out that, interestingly enough, that paper was first distributed on the internet by Jamie Zawinski, which was one of the mozilla original writers, who made a bunch of money selling Netscape stocks (when they were still worth something!), which he used to create the cool DNA Lounge, which is in front of Jon’s StudioZ. Experience the amazing counter-intuitive geometric scaling of link topologies!

Anyway, there are a few concepts that I really like in that paper:

• having the source open makes it possible to see software as literature! I never thought about how powerful this concept can be in hundreds of years from now. (if humans manage to survive their stupidity, that is)
• in a gift economy, the one who has nothing is the wealthiest because that person is the most likely to receive something. Powerful concept.
• modularization and reuse are different concerns! (in this respect, I believe that having a scripting glue for strongly-typed components will be the long-term winner. sitemap+flowscript+’pipeline components’ in cocoon or DOM+XHTML+CSS+Javascript in the browser. In both, modularity is NOT mixed with reuse and this is the reason why it rocks so much!)
• the first example of open source development model is the Oxford English Dictionary in 1857!

Now the stuff I didn’t like:

• he says that: the difference between open source and mob software is that open source topoi are technological while mob software topoi are people centered. He explicitly indicates Apache as an example of that. While I agree in general, I think there are projects where the Open Development model really revolves around the people and not around code. I’ve stated several times that it’s all about community and code is never important, just like a single individual DNA code is not important but the specie dynamics are.
• the name: mob software smells of mafia and there is too much negative meaning associated to that.

To be honest, the guy comes so close but fails to see it: it’s not mob software, it’s darwinistic software.