The Ignorance of Crowds

Carr makes a number of points succinctly and eloquently, and peppers them with relevant quotes:

Opensource tends to be “extraordinarily powerful way” to improve things that exist, but tends to be “less successful at creating exciting new programs from scratch”, and as a consequence “it’s an optimisation model rather than an invention model”

He quotes University of Michigan professor Scott Page as saying “when solving problems, diversity may matter as much as, or even more than, individual ability”, and extends this theme by saying “What an unorganised, fairly random group of people provides is not just a lot of eyeballs but a lot of different ways of seeing”

Eric Raymond, who is quoted extensively, is quoted as saying “debugging is parallelisable”; Carr builds on this, saying “all the debuggers have to do is to communicate their findings and fixes to some central authority, like Linus Torvalds.