Over at my Wordyard blog we're reading and discussing books and essays that shaped today's software world. Join the conversation.

All quotations from Open Source Applications Foundation staff and descriptions of scenes at OSAF in this book are drawn from personal observation or based on personal interviews.

About the subtitle: “Two dozen programmers” is a rough tally of the size of the Chandler development team, which started out much smaller and fluctuated over time. “Three years” represents the time I spent observing the Chandler project from January 2003 through December 2005. “4,732 bugs” is the number of bugs entered into the Chandler Bugzilla database on the date I completed writing the manuscript for this book; the number has since climbed.

This page has notes to chapters 0-5. Notes on chapters 6-9 are here. Notes on chapters 10-11 are here.

CHAPTER O
SOFTWARE TIME

• 1 — The game Sumer (also known as Hamurabi or Hammurabi) is documented in Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi. Full Basic code for the game can be found in David H. Ahl, ed., BASIC Computer Games (Creative Computing, 1978).

• 3 — Salon’s content management software is documented in an article in the online magazine Design Interact at www.designinteract.com/features_d/salon/index.html. Chad Dickerson wrote about it in his InfoWorld blog at weblog.infoworld.com/dickerson/000170.html.

• 4 — On “flow,” see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial, 1991).

• 5 — The Association for Computing Machinery’s Hello World page is at www2.latech.edu/~acm/HelloWorld.shtml.

• 6 — Knuth’s “Software is hard” appears in a number of versions of his “Theory and Practice” talk, for example on p. 134 of Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science (CSLI Publications/Cambridge University Press, 1996). The explanation of why programmers count from zero is from a Web page titled “So You’ve Hired a Hacker” by Jonathan Hayward of Fordham University, at jonathanscorner.com/writings/hacker/hacker4.html. A. P. Lawrence offers a more technical explanation at aplawrence.com/Basics/countfromzero.html.

• 6 — “Maybe you noticed that I’ve called this Chapter 0 . . .”: The occasional practice among programmers of starting books with a Chapter 0 appears to have originated with the classic programming text The C Programming Language, by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie (Prentice-Hall, 1978). Ellen Ullman also used it in her essay collection Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (City Lights, 1997).

• 8 — Details on the construction of the new Bay Bridge are from www.newbaybridge.org/.

• 9 — “Our civilization runs on software” is widely attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup across the Web, and confirmed by him in an email exchange with the author, but is hard to pin down. One original source is in slides from a course he teaches at Texas A&M University where he is a professor: courses.cs.tamu.edu/petep/1_programming_06a.pdf.

• 9 — The National Institute of Standards and Technology study is at www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/n02-10.htm.

• 9 — The Maurice Wilkes quote is from p. 145 of M. V. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer (MIT Press, 1985) as cited in M. Campbell-Kelly, “The Airy Tape: An Early Chapter on the History of Debugging,” Annals of the History of Computing 14: 4 (1992), pp. 18-28. That article is available at www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~mck/Personal/CampbellKelly1992.pdf.

• 10 — Frederick P. Brooks, “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering,” Computer, 20: 4 (April 1987), pp. 10-19. Also reprinted in The Mythical Man-Month Anniversary Edition (Addison Wesley, 1995). Available online at www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~maratb/readings/ NoSilverBullet.html.

CHAPTER ONE
DOOMED

• 14 — Netscape developers as a legion of the doomed: See Jamie Zawinski, “Netscape Dorm,” at www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html. The conference OSAF staffers attended was the O’Reilly Open Source Conferences held in July 2003.

• 17 — Brooks’s Law can be found on p. 25 of Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month Anniversary Edition (Addison Wesley, 1995). “The very unit of effort . . . deceptive myth” is on p. 16.

• 17 — “Men and months are interchangeable”: Brooks, p. 16.

• 18 — “Regenerative scheduling disaster”: p. 21.

• 18 — “Therein lies madness”: p. 25.

• 18 — “The bearing of a child takes . . .”: p. 17.

• 18 — “Conceptual integrity”: Brooks, p. 42.

• 21 — Bill Gates’s comments on the GPL as Pac-Man were widely reported in 2001, for instance on CNET News.com at news.com.com/2100-1001-268667.html.

• 21 — Torvalds’s “Just a hobby” quotation is from his 1991 message announcing the Linux project to the comp.os.minix newsgroup. It is archived many places online, e.g. at www.linux.org/people/linus_post.html.

• 22 — “that purists call GNU/Linux”: a good account of this issue is in Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy. The “Free speech” vs. “Free beer” argument is outlined at www.gnu.org/ philosophy/free-sw.html.

• 23 — All quotations from “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” may be found in the online version at www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html.

• 24 — Apache market share is tracked by the Netcraft survey at news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html.

• 25 — “The total cost of maintaining”: Brooks, p. 121.

• 26 — “Anyone may use it, fix it, and extend it”: Brooks, p. 6.

• 26 — “Incompletely delivered”: Brooks, p. 8.

• 30 — Michael Toy’s blog entry from June 26, 2003, is at blogs.osafoundation.org/blogotomy/2003_06.html.

• 31 — “A baseball manager recognizes”: Brooks, p. 155.

CHAPTER 2
THE SOUL OF AGENDA

• 33 — “Sell sugar water”: Steve Jobs’s pitch to John Sculley has become the stuff of legend. The transcript from the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, in which Sculley himself reports it, is a relatively primary source: www .pbs.org/nerds/part3.html.

• 35 — Kapor’s estimated $100 million: Business Week, May 30, 1988, p. 92.

• 36 — “It’s important to understand”: David Gans’s interview with Kapor is at www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/barlow_and_kapor_in_wired_interview.html.

• 36 — “Extricating myself from my own success”: Kapor interview in Inc., January 1, 1987.

• 37 — Lotus Agenda: general background on the program is collected at home.neo.rr.com/pim/alinks.htm. The program is still available via www.bobnewell.net/nucleus/bnewell.php?itemid=186.

• 37 — The principles behind Agenda are outlined in a development document from the original team, available at home.neo.rr.com/pim/article1.htm. James Fallows’s article on Agenda appeared in the Atlantic in May 1992.

• 41 — “In science the whole system builds”: Linus Torvalds, quoted in Business Week, August 18, 2004, at www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2004/tc20040818_1593.htm.

• 42 — Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” first appeared in the Atlantic in July 1945. It is available at www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush. My account of Douglas Engelbart’s work draws on readings from his work collected at the Bootstrap Institute Web site at www.bootstrap.org/, as well as the accounts in Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping (Stanford University Press, 2000); Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (Simon & Schuster, 1985); and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005).

• 43 — The video of Engelbart’s 1968 demo is at sloan.stanford.edu/mouse site/1968Demo.html.

• 43 — “Store ideas, study them”: From the Invisible Revolution Web site, devoted to Engelbart’s ideas, at www.invisiblerevolution.net/nls.html.

• 43 — “Successful achievements can be utilized”: From the “Whom to Augment First?” section of Engelbart’s 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” at sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/Engelbart-Papers/B5_F18_ConceptFrameworkPt4.html.

• 44 — “Improving of the improvement process”: Bootstrap Institute home page at www.bootstrap.org/.

• 44 — “The feeding back of positive research”: In the “Basic Regenerative Feature” section of Engelbart’s 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” at sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/EngelbartPapers/B5_F18_ConceptFrameworkPt4.html.

• 45 — “Some astonished visitors”: Bardini, Bootstrapping, p. 145.

• 46 — “Engelbart, for better or worse”: Alan Kay, quoted in Bardini, Bootstrapping, p. 215.

• 46 — Jaron Lanier’s story about Marvin Minsky is from a video of the “Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution” seminar at Stanford, 1998, available at unrev.stanford.edu/.

• 47 — The FBI’s software disasters were recounted in the January 14, 2005, New York Times, available at www.nytimes.com/2005/03/09/politics/09fbi.html?ex=1268110800&en=efa63369bfa14be8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. IEEE Spectrum analyzed the failure in its September 2005 issue, at www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1455.

• 48 — The IRS’s software troubles were chronicled in the December 11, 2003, New York Times, available at www.nytimes.com/2003/12/11/business/11irs.html?ex=1386478800&en=39d69ddfd8171e0c&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND. CIO Magazine’s detailed report from April 1, 2004, is at www.cio.com/archive/040104/irs.html?printversion=yes.

• 49 — The U.K. pension system crash was widely reported in the United Kingdom, for instance in this Guardian article from November 26, 2004: politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,11026,1360163,00.html.

• 49 — The McDonald’s Innovate disaster was explored in Baseline, July 2, 2003, at www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,3959,1191808,00.asp.

• 49 — Computerworld covered the Ford Everest system’s story on August 18, 2004, at www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/erp/story/0,10801,95335,00.html.

• 50 — The Standish Group’s CHAOS report data is collected at www.standishgroup.com/public.php, including the original 1994 report and several updates.

• 51 — Robert L. Glass, Software Runaways (Prentice Hall, 1998). Edward Yourdon, Death March (Prentice Hall, 1997). Robert N. Britcher, The Limits of Software (Addison Wesley, 1999).

• 51 — “May have been the greatest”: Britcher, The Limits of Software, p. 163.

• 51 — “Like replacing the engine on a car”: Britcher, p. 181.

• 51 — “The software could not be written”: Britcher, p. 185.

• 52 — “You can read the Iliad”: Britcher, p. 172.

• 52 — “One engineer I know”: Britcher, pp. 168-69.

• 53 — “All programmers are optimists”: Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month Anniversary Edition (Addison Wesley, 1995), p. 14.

• 54 — Kapor delivered his “Software Design Manifesto” at the 1990 PC Forum conference. It was later published in Terry Winograd, Bringing Design to Software (Addison Wesley, 1996). It can be found at hci.stanford.edu/bds/1-kapor.html.

• 55 — “We took the plan out”: From “Painful Birth: Creating New Software Was Agonizing Task for Mitch Kapor Firm” by Paul B. Carroll, Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1990.

CHAPTER 3
PROTOTYPES AND PYTHON

• 56 — “A crew of twenty people”: Artist Chris Cobb’s project at the Adobe Bookstore in San Francisco is chronicled at the McSweeney’s Web site at www.mcsweeneys.net/links/events/chriscobb.html.

• 59 — Information about the Semantic Web and RDF are at www.w3.org/2001/sw/.

• 61 — “Plan to throw one away” and “promise to deliver a throwaway”: Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley, 1995), pp. 115-16.

• 64 — “The programmer, like the poet”: Brooks, p. 7.

• 64 — “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet”: William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, sc. i.

• 66 — “The process of combining multiple”: The phrase is from Wikipedia’s definition of “Abstraction (computer science).” At the time of writing this phrase no longer appears on that page, but it may be found here: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abstraction_%28computer_science%29&oldid=12117920.

• 66 — “This is what programmers do”: Eric Sink, “The .Net Abstraction Pile,” blog entry at biztech.ericsink.com/Abstraction_Pile.html.

• 67 — “Close to the machine”: Title of Ellen Ullman’s book Close to the Machine (City Lights, 1997).

• 67 — “Virtually eliminate coding and debugging”: The words are from page 2 of a 1954 report titled “Preliminary Report, Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System, FORTRAN,” as cited later in John Backus, “The History of Fortran I, II, and III,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 20: 4, (Oct.-Dec., 1998) pp. 68-78, available at doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/85.728232.

• 67 — “Hand-to-hand combat with the machine”: Backus’s phrase is quoted in Steve Lohr, Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts — the Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution (Basic, 2001), p. 13.

• 69 — Moore’s Law is outlined at Intel’s Web site: www.intel.com/technology/silicon/mooreslaw/.

• 72 — Quotations from Guido van Rossum are from a talk given February 17, 2005, at the Software Development Forum in Palo Alto, California. Audio is available at www.itconversations.com/shows/detail545.html.

• 72 — Larry Wall’s talk was at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, Portland, Oregon, July 2004. Text is available at www.perl.com/pub/a/ 2004/08/18/onion.html.

• 73 — “One observer’s characterization”: The observer is Danny O’Brien in his NTK newsletter from August 6, 2004, at www.ntk.net/2004/08/06/.

• 74 — “I spent a few weeks trying”: Benjamin Pierce in a June 2001 message on a private mailing list; full quote confirmed in email to author.

• 77 — “Guido’s time machine”: Eric Raymond’s Jargon File defines it at www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/Guido.html.

• 79 — “When you program, you spend”: Paul Graham, “The Python Paradox,” August 2004, at www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html.

• 79 — Vaporware Hall of Fame: Jon Zilber in MacUser, January 1, 1990.

• 81 — Dan Gillmor’s piece: “Software Idea May Be Just Crazy Enough to Work,” San Jose Mercury News, October 20, 2002.

• 81 — The original Slashdot posting and discussion is at slashdot.org/articles/02/10/20/1827210.shtml?tid=99. Complete archives of OSAF’s mailing lists can be accessed at www.osafoundation.org/mailing_lists.htm.

• 83 — “We will first put out code”: Kapor’s blog post from November 14, 2002, is at blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/000044.html#000044.

CHAPTER 4
LEGO LAND

• 87 — David/Rys McCusker’s blog postings are no longer online.

• 93 — “In the future, programs will be built”: James Noble, “The Lego Hypothesis,” slides from talk at JAOO Conference, September 2004, at www.jaoo.org/ jaoo2004/speakers/show_speaker.jsp?oid=58. The account of James Noble and Robert Biddle’s research disproving the Lego hypothesis is drawn from James Noble, Robert Biddle, Alex Potanin, and Marcus Frean, “Scale-free Geometry in OO Programs,” Communications of the ACM, May 2005, available at portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1060716 and also www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~marcus/manuscripts/CACM.pdf.

• 95 — “In order that every user”: Maurice Wilkes, Memoirs, as cited in James Noble and Robert Biddle,”No Name: Just Notes on Software Reuse,” at www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/CS-TR-03-11.abs.html.

• 95 — Robert Glass’s observations on “reuse in the small” are from Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering (Addison Wesley, 2003), pp. 43-49.

• 95 — “It is not a will problem”: Glass, Facts and Fallacies, p. 47.

• 95 — “Transform programming from a solitary”: This and later quotes from Brad Cox are from Cox’s “Planning the Software Industrial Revolution,” IEEE Software, November 1990, and also at virtualschool.edu/cox/pub/PSIR/.

• 96 — Brad Cox, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier (Addison Wesley, 1995).

• 97 — “They do have an economic model”: Author interview with Brad Cox, June 2005.

• 97 — “Unfortunately, most programmers like to program”: Larry L. Constantine, Constantine on Peopleware (Prentice Hall, 1995), pp. 123-24.

• 99– “Keeping up with what’s available”: Ward Cunningham, quoted by Jon Udell in his InfoWorld blog at weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/05/21.html#a1006.

• 101 — “People keep pretending they can”: These lines by Ted Nelson are widely distributed on the Net, and the word “intertwingle” appears frequently in Nelson’s writing, but the original source of the full quotation is obscure. One source cited is p. 45 of the first (1974) edition of his book Computer Lib/Dream Machines. There are two discussions of the quote’s origins at www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/3260.html and listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0204b&L=ads-l&D=0&P=5140.

• 107 — “I’ve been referring to Chandler”: Kapor’s blog posting from March 29, 2003, is at blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/000139.html#000139.

CHAPTER 5
MANAGING DOGS AND GEEKS

• 117 — “They get along well with other dogs”: The labradoodle description is from www.dogbreedinfo.com/labradoodle.htm.

• 120 — “We are already too large”: From Mitch Kapor’s blog posting, Making Design Decisions: Some Principles, December 29, 2002, at blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/000097.html#000097.

• 123 — “The name for my pain”: Rick Kitts, “I Know Why Software Sucks,” February 7, 2004, at www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=32878.

• 125 — The scarecrow image is no longer at Michael Toy’s home page, but it can be found at toyblog.typepad.com/about.html.

• 125 — “The transition from programmer to manager”: This is part of the title of Toy’s Blogotomy blog at blogs.osafoundation.org/blogotomy/.

• 125 — “Michael is the last person”: This is at www.undignified.org/people.html.

• 126 — “The ground on which we are”: Michael Toy blog posting, June 26, 2003, at blogs.osafoundation.org/blogotomy/000248.html.

• 126 — “Management is about human beings”: Peter Drucker, “Management as Social Function and Liberal Art,” in The Essential Drucker (Harper Business, 2001), p. 10.

• 127 — Bill Atkinson’s “-2000″ lines of code: From Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (O’Reilly, 2005), p. 65. Also at www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story= Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt.

• 128 — “Management by wandering around”: Tom Peters in a blog posting from September 6, 2005, at www.tompeters.com/entries.php?note=008106.php.

• 129 — “With manufacturing, armies, and traditional hardware: Watts Humphrey, “Why Big Software Projects Fail,” CrossTalk, March 2005, at www.stsc.hill.af.mil/CrossTalk/2005/03/0503Humphrey.html.

• 130 — According to wordorigins.org, geek “is a variant of geck, a term of Low German/Dutch origin that dates in English to 1511. It means a fool, simpleton, or dupe.” Geck appears in Twelfth Night, Act V, scene i; a variant, geeke, turns up in Cymbeline, Act V, scene iv.

• 130 — “One who eats (computer) bugs”: The original definition of computer geek is from Eric Raymond, ed., The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 3rd ed. (MIT Press, 1996), p. 120.

• 131 — “geek: A person who has chosen”: The current definition of geek from the online Jargon File (source of the Hacker’s Dictionary) is at www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/geek.html.

• 131 — “To geek out on something”: From Neal Stephenson, “Turn On, Tune In,Veg Out,” New York Times, June 17, 2005, and also at www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html?ex=1276660800&en=a693ccc4ec008424&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss.

• 131 — “Some deranged fold of my lizard brain”: Merlin Mann on his 43 Folders blog, September 15, 2004, at www.43folders.com/2004/09/15/homecomforts-illustrated-housekeeping-pr0n/.

• 132 — Jennifer Tucker, Abby Mackness, Hile Rutledge, “The Human Dynamics of Information Technology Teams," in Crosstalk, February 2004, at www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crossTalk/2004/02/0402Tucker.html.

• 133 — “A lot of people feel that”: Abby Mackness presentation at the Systems & Software Technology Conference, Salt Lake City, April 2004.

• 133 — Steve Silberman, “The Geek Syndrome,” Wired, December 2001, at www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html.

• 135 — “The typical behavior of a student”: Gerald Weinberg,The Psychology of Computer Programming, Silver Anniversary Edition (Dorset House, 1998), p. 50.

• 138 — “I figured, OK, I’m running this repository”: Ward Cunningham’s talk at the OOPSLA Conference, October 2004,Vancouver, B.C.

• 139 — The Portland Pattern Repository is at c2.com/ppr/.

• 140 — The OSAF wiki is at wiki.osafoundation.org.

• 142 — Brooks’s discussion of the Tower of Babel is in The Mythical Man-Month Anniversary Edition, (Addison Wesley, 1995), p. 74.

• 143 — “There are a couple of dark sides”: James Gosling, “Sharpen the Axe: The Dark Side,” blog entry from January 4, 2005, at today.java.net/jag/page13.html#106.

• 143 — The Jargon File entry on yak shaving is at www.faqs.org/docs/jargon/Y/yak-shaving.html.

On to the notes for Chapters 6-9