When the bazaar sets out to build cathedrals

In this chapter, the authors describe the inter-relationships between ThreadWeaver/Akonadi with the KDE project, and the development process in large scale open-source projects. One of the first things that struck me before the authors described these two projects in KDE was the way in which the focus is on developing and maintaining quality code within open-source projects. The authors have hit the nail in the coffin when they allude to the fact that open-source code is mostly of a higher quality than proprietary code. This fact can also be seen from the huge success of community open-source development programs like the Google Summer of Code. The motivation of just "reaching the finish line" rather than money or fame seems to work really well.

The Akonadi project by itself has several benefits, and the one of the interesting things that I noticed in its design was the focus on maintaining the stability of the overall system by way of providing separate processes for components requiring access to a certain kind of storage backend. Linking together of components with third-party libraries without compromising the stability of the overall system is also one aspect which seemed advantageous in the initial design of the Akonadi architecture. The authors have mentioned a series of code optimizations which seemed potentially useful, and even though I have not done much research into whether these have been implemented, I am interested in knowing the outcome of this. Does anyone know more about these optimizations?