Comment by asiachick
4 years ago
I agreed with a lot of the points and that often source code might not be valuable but.... Much of it sounded like only thinking of a small team doing something no one else care about.
Conversely we have github and the millions of libraries it hosts in the form of source code.
We also have examples of WebKit based on KHTML, Blink based on that. Electron/Edge/Brave/Vivaldi based on Chromium. There is no one programmer who has the entirety of Chromium in their head and I'm pretty confident most teams would not find it easier to write their own browser from scratch. Chromium or WebKit are embedded in many places. PS5 and Oculus Quest are two off the top of my head.
I don't think that Naur was arguing that it has to be a single developer who knows everything. It could also be multiple developers, where each one of them has loaded a sub-problem of a bigger problem into their head.
Usually in OSS projects you have a handful or so of contributors doing the bulk of the work, right? Imagine them all going away at once for one of those projects you mentioned. I feel the project would be in pretty bad shape.