I quoted several bits from Frederick P. Brooks's classic The Mythical Man-Month because, in many respects, his insights have yet to be improved upon. I heartily recommend the 25th Anniversary edition from Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-83595-9), which adds his 1986 ``No Silver Bullet'' paper.
The new edition is wrapped up by an invaluable 20-years-later retrospective in which Brooks forthrightly admits to the few judgements in the original text which have not stood the test of time. I first read the retrospective after this paper was substantially complete, and was surprised to discover that Brooks attributes bazaar-like practices to Microsoft!
Gerald M. Weinberg's The Psychology Of Computer Programming (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold 1971) introduced the rather unfortunately-labeled concept of ``egoless programming''. While he was nowhere near the first person to realize the futility of the ``principle of command'', he was probably the first to recognize and argue the point in particular connection with software development.
Richard P. Gabriel, contemplating the Unix culture of the pre-Linux era, reluctantly argued for the superiority of a primitive bazaar-like model in his 1989 paper Lisp: Good News, Bad News, and How To Win Big. Though dated in some respects, this essay is still rightly celebrated among Lisp fans (including me). A correspondent reminded me that the section titled ``Worse Is Better'' reads almost as an anticipation of Linux. The paper is accessible on the World Wide Web at http://www.naggum.no/worse-is-better.html.
De Marco and Lister's Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (New York; Dorset House, 1987; ISBN 0-932633-05-6) is an underappreciated gem which I was delighted to see Fred Brooks cite in his retrospective. While little of what the authors have to say is directly applicable to the Linux or open-source communities, the authors' insight into the conditions necessary for creative work is acute and worthwhile for anyone attempting to import some of the bazaar model's virtues into a commercial context.
Finally, I must admit that I very nearly called this paper ``The Cathedral and the Agora'', the latter term being the Greek for an open market or public meeting place. The seminal ``agoric systems'' papers by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler, by describing the emergent properties of market-like computational ecologies, helped prepare me to think clearly about analogous phenomena in the open-source culture when Linux rubbed my nose in them five years later. These papers are available on the Web at http://www.agorics.com/agorpapers.html.