9 am. Most of my overnight online work is taken care of. Now to continue capturing some of the points from Raymond's book.

• The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
• Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
• when you hit a wall, it's often time to ask not whether you've got the right answer, but whether you're asking the right question. Perhaps the problem needs to be reframed.
• Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
• When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise.
• What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseable future.
• The project coordinator or leader must have good people and communications skills.
• you need to attract people, interest them in what you're doing, and keep them happy about the amount of work they're doing.
• Brook's Law: "The complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly."
• In shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere.
• the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.
• the well-known variance of a factor of one hundred in productivity between the most able programmers and the merely competent.
• it is often cheaper and more effective to recruit self-selected volunteers from the Internet than it is to manage buildings full of people who would rather be doing something else.
• We have fun doing what we do.
• Joy is an asset.
• One of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.
• Open source is not magic pixie dust.

Here is a lengthy quote taken from the book:

"Weinberg quotes the autobiography of the 19th-century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, to good effect on this subject:

Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with (free) men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills." (pp. 63-64).

A great way to end an hour. And I still have most of the day in front of me.