When open source projects close the process, something's wrong
Twice in recent weeks open source projects have surprised me with their lack of openness. In both cases, developers acted or spoke out in such a way as to intentionally push other developers away from their work.
Case one: Evil icon thieves
The first incident originated with KDE's Oxygen project, an icon redesign on track for inclusion in KDE 4. Oxygen designer David Vignoni expressed his disapproval that someone outside the project team put together a theme package incorporating the project's publicly accessible icons. He asked the theme packager to remove the Oxygen icons. Commenters on his blog cheered.
A few days later, Wade Olson of KDE's Marketing Working Group attacked the theme packager in his own blog post, calling the second-hand theme morally suspect and a violation of the Social Contract. Commenters on his blog cheered as well, and soon began to attack the theme packager in comments on the theme's page at the art portal gnome-look.org.
Case two: We have enough ideas without you
The second incident cropped up in the GIMP's User Interface Redesign effort. When I researched the GIMP UI brainstorm in October, I was struck by the stark "us" versus "them" language used in the project.
Also:
Wow. I guess for those who have yet to be forced to compete with open source, it's permissible to come out with grossly inaccurate comments about open source. Even Microsoft would never say something like this, which Diane Greene (VMware's CEO) said to The Register:
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Not invented here
There's an acronym for this attitude, isn't there? NIH (Not Invented Here).