> > Stumbled on this....a good read imo: http://apcmag.com/node/6735/
>
>What was it that you found interesting about that? What did you learn?
>Do you see Open Source as better or worse after you read the article?
>
>That type of story - someone fixes something, everyone fights over it,
>rejected, accepted, modified, thrown away, rewritten, endlessly
>debated, hurt feelings, someone storms off, patch rewritten, results
>improved - seems to happen all over, whether it's kernel patchs or
>zoning board decisions.
The maddening common human unwillingness to look at what is going on in
one's own mileu objectively is what I get out of all such stories.
It's easy for anybody to justify what they do with some variation on,
"Well, the people I work with thing we're doing the right thing, and what
I'm doing makes me feel good, so who cares what anybody outside the process
thinks?"
People do this ALL the time.
This is why everybody hates whistle-blowers, even though it is virtually
impossible to argue, from an objective viewpoint, that a whistle-blower who
has his facts right has done anything but make a positive contribution to
the general welfare.
Me--I always side with the people who buck the in-group and go public with
the ways in which the in-group is neglecting the needs of the much larger
out-group whom they claim to be serving. Because in-groups seek to meet the
needs of their members far more often than they seek to meet the needs of
those they claim to serve, and they do that ALL THE TIME.
Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org
©2007 Ken Dibble |
