Interesting read on what open source has been good for, on the dif­fer­ence be­tween Linux and Wikipedia and on how to best har­ness the power of crowds.

Also a highly pos­i­tively re­viewed new book that for­mal­izes in al­most math­e­mat­i­cal fash­ion what di­ver­sity is good for (I haven’t read it yet). The clas­si­cal work on the mat­ter is “The Wisdom of crowds”.

Excerpt from the ini­tial ar­ti­cle: “Raymond was clear on that point when, to­ward the end of his pa­per, he ex­am­ined some of the “necessary pre­con­di­tions” for the bazaar model of pro­duc­tion. “It’s fairly clear,” he wrote, “that one can­not code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, de­bug and im­prove in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to orig­i­nate a pro­ject in bazaar mode.” In a re­cent e-mail to me, he was even blunter. “The in­di­vid­ual wiz­ard,” he wrote, “is where suc­cess­ful bazaar pro­jects gen­er­ally start.” “