It's been over a year now, wow. Even so, I still exist on this frail planet we refer to as earth. While many believe the planet is spherical, most people have not directly witnessed the alleged sphericality, and so it's more of a belief system to them at best. I've not seen it personally first hand, and so I can only trust this theory less than 100% at best. It very well could be perfectly flat as was popularly believed hundreds of years ago. One of these days I'm going to take a far away vacation and go take digital pictures of the edge of the earth, just to dispel this radical idea of a spherical planet.

On a far less serious note however ... *cough*

Observations: People who come from a software development background mostly based in the closed cathedral style of "design by voting commitee" software development, just don't "get" open source, or fit into our open source culture very well. It's very much like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

One of us open source developers would perhaps discuss a given problem in IRC or a quick email to a developmental mailing list, and probably receive back a useful "well, square pegs don't fit into round holes, try this instead <hands round peg>" type of response, then check some code into CVS to work around the problem.

These people however, tend to over-study the problem at hand, like it was rocket-science, congregate in groups to talk for hours on teleconfrences and bored meetings (oops, did I mean board there?), have a meeting about the meeting, turn to each other and say "I concur" a few times, then finally after maybe 3 months, or 4 years as the case may be, perhaps come up with a conclusion and draw up a positional draft entitled "Square pegs, and their alleged incompatibility with round holes".

After many more conference calls to debate the exact wording and various issues as to the size of the pegs, and whatnot, it is then of course time for a vote on the proposal after a few more conference calls.

My theory however, is that while they (in a theoretical sense that is) are voting on trive, the open source community walks right past with code in hand, and solutions present themselves. Did someone say something about the meek?

So what is my point? Simple really, I just wonder how much money is wasted every year in long distance telephone bills for largely wasted efforts, when "show me the code" reigns supreme. Makes me want to purchase stock in a long distance carrier.