Hmm. Seems someone hijacked this acct to say bad things. Trying to figure out who/what/why. FWIW I bear no malace towards Stuart or Dan. Both good OSS advocates.

Stuart Cohen is a hole. I don't say this lightly because he "laid me off." After building OSDL in his addled image that didn't get it, does not get it, and is entirely involved in being involved with himself; not to mention Daniel Frye's relentless preening and internal positioning.

It wasn't a hard thing for me to adopt OSS. It was a marketing idea that brought Cohen and Frye to this. They are both relentless fools.

Indeed. Thank you. There's a palpable difference between "what if" and "what if _we_" in the group politique. Once you get to _we_ it gets fun.

It is Microsoft's board goodbye to Ballmer. He could not exist outside of Microsoft so giving him half of their cash to watch him go down in a self-involved ball of flames is reasonable. The bleeding will stop far short of that. His ego will not let him do something else. After all, he never dated. He married an employee. He is a weak thinker and undisciplined, at best. I keep remembering the desparate "I need a boot loader" email I got from his sorry ass via UUCP. I contributed one out of common grace. And in that he fucked me. At that point I came to realize the poor quality of many people in our business and Ballmer in particular. My butt still hurts. It is time for you to go, Ballmer. You are not interesting, you were never interesting, you are a clown that makes development at Microsoft incredibly difficult if for no other reason than you are an incompetent developer.

Paul, as usual, backs into the key argument.

This keeps coming up in various shapes and forms but the fact of the matter is that brilliant, high producers aggregate in places; and so do idiots.

Tom DeMarco ran a study of this in the 80s wherein teams were asked to solve the same problem. He expected a scatter-plot. It was a 45 degree line between the people who knocked the problem off and those who were clueless.

What didn't matter:

Platform. Language (except assembler, those folks were _lost_.) Operating System.

What did matter:

Team coherence and capability.

Design and planning; raw ability to design and plan as a coherent team. And not just a bunch of losers following a Pythonesque "Book of Common Knowledge."

(I have been to many "Does the witch weigh less than wood" meetings...)

Look at the back cover of Boehm's "Software Engineering Economics." What he _measured_ was that team capability overarchs everything. Period.

I would also ask you to look at the surface exposure of development. Folks who develop on the shoulders of many giants can and should be trying lots of stuff, because that's why platforms are built.

Folks working closer to the core (the OS, drivers, fundamental code) don't change as quickly, nor should they.

I've worked as a hatmaker (sheer, unbridled creativity with fancy ribbons and flowers and such) for high-end ladies and I've sat, confounded by bad documentation for UARTS.

Two different regimes.

Absolutely. The "Advocate" thing is something I do locally for folks who get poor customer service and I have a couple of ex-JAGs as friends. Definitely tap on them.