At Tue, 28 Dec 2010 09:02:04 -0500, Edward Diener wrote:
Software design is almost always an individual conception and no amount of community involvement is going to change that. Of course a developer can be influenced by the comments of others about the particulars of a software library. But I can never believe that a community of people can effectively design a software library no matter what proof you may want to try to bring from other environments like Linux and other open source projects.
Good designs can be the product a small community. I designed the Boost.Iterator library with two other people. I believe that there are at least five people who could be considered designers of the Spirit library, probably more. In that case there's one visionary leader, but IIUC, design work is actively solicited and used. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com