On 07/15/2015 05:07 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > To tie this back to the original question, I was thinking of actual open > source projects. It is common when a group of people form to build a > software package that the concept for what the capability is, is reasonably > clear to the founding members. Make a better FOO. Then, some other people > come along and don't understand that mission or try to advocate a different > mission, like another BAR mission. The relevance of their input can be > higher if they are productive people, but often they are not, and they are > just in the way and taking up space, participating in advocacy of dubious > value, etc. It is different from a commercial enterprise in so far as > "make a better FOO" is measured some way other than by ROI in money. > "Better" can mean technical properties that the group understands and see > worth pursuing for its own sake.
Yes, but the same hypothesis applies: those with the most extreme opinions (about FOO or BAR) will have more extreme opinions about non-FOO or non-BAR, creating noise of dubious value. And that would allow the middlings to be both productive _and_ there primarily for the sake of being part of the community, with little skin in FOO or BAR. Unless what you're saying is that, in your experience, the hypothesis does not hold ... that, perhaps particularly where $$ isn't the measure, the extremists can have only extreme opinions about the 1 thing and that it's the cohesion of the extremists that predicts success? But if that's what you're saying, then it's _not_ an argument for why there are fewer user-facing open-source tools than back-end open-source tools. Since user-facing tools tend to be multi-aspect, if the hypothesis is false and someone holding extreme views about one aspect can have middling views about all the other aspects, then they can be just as productive re: the aspects on which they don't hold extreme views. Similarly, they can cooperate nicely with others who hold extreme views about other aspects. But if the hypothesis is right, then getting a FOO-extremist to work productively with a BAR-extremist will be difficult because they'll both be extremists in both aspects: hence user-facing tools will likely be built for money, not ideology. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella Then I'm afraid you'll have to cry ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
