Part 2934803748.

Sorry Rik: This shows you did not get this. See, you stated that 'obviously all of these [OSS advocating] people are very smart'. And I would have to agree :-) But my point was exactly that this smartness is not about IQ. Not about intrinsic processing capabilities. Very much about willing-ness and doing-ness. That there is no IQ treshold to get into sharing your thoughts (damn, our blogs is like living prove :-)). That I indeed also do not care about the smartest person if he is just closed up in his room. I hope the sales guy's work will add up to big dividends...Let us blame it on my bad English, but I just tried to redefine smart from 'having highest IQ score' to 'having most interconnnected shared thoughts and biggest falback community for cleaning out code, ideas, architectures'

And I am totally with you here: OSS is for the happy few. Believe me, I was running around at the conference in Amsterdam and felt like an ALIEN! There is indeed so damn few people that know about this tribe of people sharing knowledge (more then code). And believe me, we are happy!

So explain me: what is keeping the wining unhappy masses from joining in? Their own believe (prejudice) that it will be too dificult? The fact that they don't want to? What is so frightening about it? What is so comforting about the 'at least we paid for not knowing the details'? Why the fear? Who dumped them in the spiral of lack of knowledge leading to uncertainty leading to hiding from more knowledge leading to... Who made them doubth they can be 'smart' too?

So, yes. Answering the question with 'the masses say|believe so' is bound to be labeled as FUD. In the mean time, OSS is just there, ready to be used, ready to be discovered by the next: 'Hey, I missed out on the mysterious dificulty-treshold'.On the side: this makes me think about what I read here by the way - the great quote was this:

And most of the development managers agreed. They found that when their companies deployed a large, enterprise system based on J2EE, the implementation was almost always done by the vendor or by a consulting firm selected by the vendor rather than employees of the company. They also cited this phenomenon as the reason that their companies wouldnt pay for training on the J2EE platform; they were in a Catch-22 with regard to trained J2EE resources. If they paid to have them trained, the employees would leave to work for consulting firms where they made more money. If they didnt have trained employees, they would have to pay consulting firms to install and maintain their J2EE-based systems.

Actually I can't believe it is the same guy that told me about the cluetrain, who is now playing the hard to get (through). Dunnow if I ever told you the story of back in Alcatel time: [We were doing this advanced research project that involved a brand new, not yet broadly available Cisco router. It took me 3 weeks to get through 1st (didn't knew they had the router), 2nd (never heard about ATM at that moment), 3rd line (first level that could look into the code!) support to receive the patch I asked for. It didn't work though. While still testing I suddenly noticed that the 'show version' command on this patch carried this detail of "patch xxx build by [username]" ... Guess what: in less then 12 hours some [username]@cisco.com without the extra barriers was happy I helped to nail his bug. Although he mentioned that sending that mail straight through was somewhat "uncommon".]

But there is quite an amount of true horror in these stories... Who at cisco was now entitled to the $100 bonus for finding a bug? The danger of each organisation is that it well end up finding its only reason of being in its existence :-)

And there was no open source in the cisco example, there were only barriers. Like the escrow thing: the barrier there is your company would need to 'cease to exist' (which I would regret a lot) for me to get unlimited access to the code (even if it was for helping you out. You know I did, and "there is" a fair amount of closed source debugging for the CSS industry which is double paid for by means of support contracts.)

The only barrier to open source is in choosing to hide behind it. (The 'it' being 'that barrier'). Don't bother to hide: you will get hit anyway.

It is not about how much knowledge my brain can hold. It is about how many of the knowledge out there is not kept away from me in some bad tasting attempt to preserve the own commercial position. It is not making you do a better job, nor is it helping me. You know, it all is cluetrain. Conversations, man!

11:35:45 PM