[JoshTriplett]

As a developer, I've specifically pushed to maintain a co-located team, precisely because the type of work my team does works far better when co-located.

I do decentralized development regularly, and for some kinds of work it works fine. For other kinds of work, it makes simple tasks take an order of magnitude longer.

[jasonjei]

As far as I know, kernel.org does most of their work decentralized. Is XNU (Darwin) a significantly better kernel? I have doubts about that claim.

[JoshTriplett]

The Linux kernel does distributed development quite successfully, and scales extremely well. However, it does so partly by sacrificing some forms of coordination between developers; for instance, kernel maintainers don't consider duplicated effort to solve the same issue a problem, because the overall process still scales even if some individual developers end up wasting their time.

On the other hand, the development of any one individual patch series to implement one feature typically occurs either by one developer, or by a set of co-located developers in one organization, not by geographically distributed developers. And some other kinds of work, such as backporting or rebasing a series of patches, doesn't work well when geographically distributed.