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Although the Tims position is not new but he presents it in a very interesting way. Perhaps the most interesting aspect about collaboration is giving enough people the ability to participate. Making the physical communications easy is only a part of the story, making a common language (I do not mean simply the spoken language e.g. English) but the subjects sub-language, for example in a Electronics discussion forum you have to be familiar with the terms and concepts of Electronics. Herein lies the the fundamental problem that I see - the successive sub-specialization a forking of all disciplines.
The general participation that we see on discussion boards
I will take Linux kernel development as an example - an arbitrary choice. The first observation to make is that the cost on entry is that you have to be a C programmer, and CS degree definitely helps. I am sure it was relatively easy to be a participant in Linux kernel development 10 years ago, but as the components have become ever more complex the fewer percentage of potential contributors are able to participate.
The whole point of this is to also suggest that the other paradigm shift we need with open source is to put particular emphasis on simplifying principles that again open up the field for greater participation. Perhaps it is time for the Kernel to take Andrew Tannenbaum's early criticism of the kernel more seriously. Again the purpose of it is to suggest that simplifying and separating out components will allow greater collaboration by enabling a greater number of people to participate.
Perhaps even more than the kernel, projects like XFree86 show the danger of open source with open collaboration, despite the many advantages of the X model, the graphical interface on Linux/Unix has faller far behind OS X and even Windows XP. The beauty of the Unix model is that encourages loosely coupled cooperative systems, but even those cooperating systems, in time, become large, monolithic, and ossified. Ossification is the fate that any system suffers once it fails to easily allow new participants to to be easily introduced to development process.
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