I have been lurking on this list for sometime, and I appreciate the educated, informed posts here.
The question of one centralized repository for all knowledge relating to Linux versus the merits of letting 10,000 flowers bloom is a very deep issue that our DTP community has been exploring in video through the Digital Tipping Point video project. I don't have any answers, and IMHO, there probably are no answers, as this might well be one of the profound, unsolveable questions of humanity: order and stability leading potentially to tyranny and stagnation versus diversity and creativity leading potentially to chaos and wasted resources.
A long, long time ago, in the mid 1600s, Thomas Hobbes wrote a treatise called Leviathan that still poses questions central to our discussion here. Thomas Hobbes basically was upset by the English Civil War, which broke out in 1642. There was much strife and chaos as a result of the war, and in part as a result of what he saw as the horrors of that war, Hobbes wrote that no civil society is possible unless all citizens surrender their independence to a strong central authority, a Leviathan. He felt that the rabble could not govern itself. His most famous quote is that without a central authority, human lives would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes#Leviathan
You could call Steve Ballmer a neo-Hobbesian, because he said that FOSS cannot succeed because it lacks a "center of gravity." Those words are especially eerie when you lay them down alongside Thommy Hobbes' call for a surrender of autonomy. Ballmer is basically saying that we, the FOSS rabble, cannot govern ourselves.
We must prove him wrong.
The Roman Empire imposed a tense peace on the world by virtue of their military dominance, and likewise, Microsoft, like IBM before it, has imposed certain standards on the computing industry. Now is the time for us as a global community to evolve out of the Pax Romana that Microsoft has imposed on the computing world.
If we lack structure, we will not be able to mount an concerted effort to break the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop.
On the other hand, our community is unlikely to tolerate another monopolist like Microsoft, and so some of us tend to criticize popular distros like Ubuntu as seeking to claim too much power.
We _must_ sort out these issues, and achieve the right balance between chaos and tyranny.
I believe that one of the truly remarkable things about FOSS is that it will be one trend that will help the entire human family learn how to balance democracy and stability.
The particular question at hand is whether to start a new forum at linuxmusicians.com , or whether to stay with the venerable linuxaudio.org. I am too new to this list to suggest the correct answer, and I don't pretend to know the answer. But I do know that each of us should privately ask ourselves what we can do to move the whole community forward, even if it is maybe a short term inconvenience to ourselves.
One thing is clear to me; we must keep our discourse civil. For example, we cannot call Miguel de Icaza a "Microsoft shill" merely because he praised OOXML as a "superb standard." I personally think that Miguel should have used his considerable influence to improve ODF, but still, we must not descend into name-calling.
We must resolve the issue of GPL2 and GPL3 for the GNU and Linux kernel projects respectively.
We should refrain from bitterly criticizing the open source folks if we prefer to call it "Free Software", and vice versa; we should not bitterly criticize Stallman for insisting that we call it GNU/Linux, even if we do consider him to be too strident in his tone.
Our success will come down to our ability to collaborate. Microsoft has tons of money and a rigid command-and-control structure. If we are to succeed, we must strive for cohesiveness while preserving our diversity.
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Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point
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