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Scott Leslie, edtechpost, Nov 06, 2006

Scott Leslie wonders why "First Monday publishes this article by the co-author of The Social Life of Information, Paul Duguid, that asks questions about the oft-asserted transferability of "laws of quality" from open source software projects to the peer production of 'knowledge' in sites like Wikipedia, and literally almost no one replies." Perhaps, he says, "everyone just read this already and went on with their business." Count me as one who read it and went about his business. Well - I thought I had linked to it, but I didn't.

Why? I found his example ridiculous. So Project Gutenberg is forced to use an older, less reliable source because of copyright restrictions. This is a criticism of open source? So little used and obscure open data is wrong. This somehow refutes the 'many eyeballs' theory? And his methodology is akin to finding some bugs in some minor open source software and comncluding that therefore commercial software is of better quality.

I guess I figured someone else would say these things (some days I get tired of being the messenger). Guess not, eh? (p.s. speaking of being the messenger - Scott, why is your site now launching really annoying popup ads?) (p.p.s check out Scott Leslie's talk, The Future CMS.)

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