Re: The prevailing Debian culture
On Mon, 2004-08-09 at 15:23, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> I thought I'd drop this in here, as it's a good description of how I feel
> about the culture of Debian, and what makes Debian a good thing.
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/08/msg00057.html
Hm.
In that letter, I have a couple of points to address.
> But a number
> of such confrontational interactions in the past have challenged what
> used to be well established ideas, and thus mitigated against group
> think; any evolution away from the current norm should consider what
> would be lost.
There are ways to have confrontation and challenge group-think without
being flamefesty or painful to read.
> This culture of create a solution to meet your own needs, and
> let the best solution win (suboptimal solutions lose mind share) is
> one of the major strengths of free software. We may find, however,
> that this also engenders a certain competitiveness, especially in
> grabbing mind share; and you can't totally eliminate one without
> harming the other.
Competitiveness .. urk.
I guess the thing here is that while competition brings out the best in
some people, it brings out the worst - or completely suppresses -
others.
I'm not saying 'stop doing things your way', I'm saying only 'ok, fine,
so a competition based culture works for you - please don't assume it
works for everyone'.
If you already knew that .. then sure, we can discuss it further. If you
didn't, now you know. Feel free to ask questions and try to explore the
idea. :)
Jenn V.
--
"Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture
you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.
My book 'Essential CVS': published by O'Reilly in June 2003.
jenn@anthill.echidna.id.au http://anthill.echidna.id.au/~jenn/
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