A little more free thinking on using TOC theories with open source management, and how it can be used to increase productivity and ease the 'murphy's' that exist for anyone that is dealing with group type development. A good article on the subject (more a research paper, but nonetheless) explains the relationships of the constraints to scheduling and management.
http://www.sytsma.com/cism700/toc.html
Granted the TOC theories are often thought of in the context of manaufacturing, however the overall concept can be applyed anywhere, such as project management, or optimizing any system to make the system run better.
The two main things that I am confused on though is the actual "Goal" of a open source project. There needs to be one actual pot of gold at the end of the rainbow so you can set your sites on it, and set the system to exploit the constraints accordingly. What is the goal of any open source project? Is it just simply the satisfaction of creating instead of the normal throughput measurements of business?
I did find a couple of interesting articles on the subject, including one on Advogato by rakholh which he says "The whole point of making a program is not to keep it tucked away in some secret hidden vault. It's for everyone else out there to enjoy and use. That is the ultimate goal of any program, be it opensource, closedsource, commercial or non-commercial." but I am not so sure that it applies to what I am thinking, because commercial projects main goal is not to have everyone use the program if you buy into the therory of constraints but rather the end goal is alway to make money. So can the same be applied?
Hmmm, more pondering to do:) Seems its a difficult question for me to answer.