Something clicked in my head today when I was talking with Jonathan Blandford on the phone today. He described to me the idea of the Cargo Cult, something I had never heard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult In fact, there's even an entry for use in computer science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_software_engineering Until now I had no name for the behaviors that I saw in Fedora and other open source projects. We do this a lot. The conversation usually goes: <abe> Ubuntu has a live cd! We should have a live cd and then we will be teh win! <bob> Yes, of course! Let us build one from these sticks and coconuts! (This is a bad example, of course, because I do actually believe that having a working livecd has a lot of great side effects: keeping our base small and compact and letting people try out our technologies easily.) What jumped out at me from the article is this paragraph: "In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size mockups of airplanes out of straw, and created new military style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. Ultimately, though these practices did not bring about the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, they did have the effect of eradicating the religious practices that had existed prior to the war." I think that we need to be careful when we decide to move to new models for things. Understanding the underlying reason why we do anything is just as important as actually doing them. When we've talked about support for proprietary codecs or letting people use Fedora in new contexts (the trademark thing) we need to understand they why just as much as the how. So far we've been good, I think. We haven't lost our soul, or by mixing metaphors, our religious practices. But there's still a lot of opportunity in the future to make a mistake like this. So we need to keep vigilant and keep our sense of purpose. That is all. Carry on. --Chris _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
