STYLE
From Wise Nano
The Style of a program describes the number of people who are authorized by the program´s initiators to
- know about the program
- directly influence the program.
For each property the possible states are "a limited number of people" and "an unlimited number of people", resulting in 4 permutations. The permutation "limited number of people who may know about the program" and "unlimited number of people who may deliberatly and directly influence the program" is invalid, because the number of deliberate contributors is capped by the number of those who know about it, resulting in 3 possible values for the Style dimension:
Covert
- a limited number of people may know about the program.
- a limited number of people may directly influence the program.
The purpose of conducting a program covertly is to hide its very existence, its goals, and its state of progress from possible competitors. Usually a considerable percentage of the allocated ressources are devoted exclusively to achieve this. Only a limited range of selected persons are allowed to work on a covert program. This range is kept as small as possible and its members are background-checked as thorough as possible to minimize the chance of one being a spy.
Examples: Intelligence reports; secret development of novel commercial applications; the Manhattan Project.
Public
- an unlimited number of people may know about the program.
- a limited number of people may directly influence the program.
The existence of a public program may be known to any number of people, but not necessarily all its details, like the exact path to the goal or its state of progress, to keep an advantage above competitors. A variable, but usually not as dominating percentage of a program´s budget are spent to maintain this partial secrecy. Only a limited number of people directly work at the program, for example regular employees. Industrial espionage is very common nowadays to find out all about a comptitor´s program or general technology. Most programs today are public.
Examples: commercial encyclopediae; legislation; the Apollo Program.
Open
- an unlimited number of people may know about the program and all its details.
- an unlimited number of people may directly and deliberately influence the program.
A style of development that has gained momentum over the last years, its so far only manifestation being the Open Source movement. No resources are devoted to secrecy, everybody may look at all the details (e.g. source code), edit, redistribute and sell them freely. Several licenses, which have already been tested in court, have evolved to guarantee the openness of an Open project, to protect it or parts of it from being utilized in Public/Covert projects or proprietary commercialization. Currently, because of limitations of material technology, Open projects are restricted to pure software development; however, molecular manufacturing is expected to lift this restriction and allow Open source principles´ application to physical world´s products.
Examples: open source development; the Wikipedia encyclopedia.
