Bazaar

Eric Raymond:

...release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity - came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here - rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches...

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Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

The power of this effect is easy to underestimate. In fact, pretty well all of us in the open-source world drastically underestimated how well it would scale up with number of users and against system complexity, until Linus Torvalds showed us differently.

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"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus' Law".

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Sociologists years ago discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than that of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. They called this the "Delphi effect". 

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It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style.

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The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people.

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The "severe effort of many converging wills" is precisely what a project like Linux requires - and the "principle of command" is effectively impossible to apply among volunteers in the anarchist's paradise we call the Internet. To operate and compete effectively, hackers who want to lead collaborative projects have to learn how to recruit and energize effective communities of interest in the mode vaguely suggested by Kropotkin's "principle of understanding". They must learn to use Linus' Law.

Earlier I referred to the "Delphi effect" as a possible explanation for Linus' Law. But more powerful analogies to adaptive systems in biology and economics also irresistably suggest themselves. The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved.