Some weeks ago, I finished reading Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar (the book). Raymond presents a thorough analysis of the hacker culture and invites the reader to a journey of self-reflection (provided she's part of that culture and hasn't done it so far). I'd recommend reading it -- maybe except for The Magic Cauldron. I'm not that down with that kind of economics in this context.
The analysis of the bazaar model was probably the most interesting one. I was surprised when I recognized its parallels with eXtreme Programming.
One of the lessons Raymond mentions is Release early,
release often. And listen to your customers. He goes
on and mentions the importance of constant, even daily
improvement that should be visible to the users[1], giving
them an ego-satisfying piece of action
and keeping
them motivated. Raymond claims that this is one the main
reasons of Linux' success.
But these are also the cornerstones of agile methodologies, namely points 1, 3, 4 and 5 of the Manifesto.
Of course there are differences. The bazaar model is just an analysis, a set of guidelines for other hackers; agile methodologies are aimed at professional firms working for customers. Agile methodologies are realized by formal processes, while collaborations in the open source culture seem to evolve informally. But the similarities are interesting.
- In this context, this includes (potential) co-developers as well.