I believe Eric Raymond said it best when he said open source is about
developers scratching a personal itch. Sometimes it's a big itch, and
we need help to give it a proper scratching, and so we work together,
and call it a project. To a lot of developers, the project is simply a
means to an end, and if they could do it alone, they would.
To some people, the project can become an end to itself, and the
products simply a means to that end.
It's been my personal belief that most any system will work, so long as
people actually use it. When things go wrong, it's often because there
is more than one system in place, and the methods conflict.
Perhaps one reason there have been so many conflicts here lately may be
that some people are scratching their "project" itch, and have trouble
understanding why someone would just want to scratch a "product" itch
instead. Meanwhile, other people have trouble understanding why open
source project-engineering would have precedence over the
product-engineering.
Sometimes the answer is that you have to respectively agree to
disagree, and let meritocracy run its course.
-- Ted Husted, Husted dot Com, Fairport NY USA.
-- Custom Software ~ Technical Services.
-- Tel 716 425-0252; Fax 716 223-2506.
-- http://www.husted.com/
