Over the years I have had somewhat mixed results reaching people with various points in my blogs. I usually work pretty hard to set the stage for a position I am about to take. In some cases, I have written an entire series of posts before coming to the main point. Not everything is easy to say. Not everything can be functionally decomposed into byte size morsels.

A recent example was a post I did over at TalkBMC. I tried to set up the framework of what I was looking at and why, but I came across some comments in another forum about my post and it was clear that I had not succeeded. At least not for the people inspired enough to respond in the forum. The comments were all over the place: Anywhere from "So What?"(which is fine: The subject was specific enough that if one was not affected the post was probably not interesting) to one like "What a loser, he spent all his time saying this and that". i wondered if they had read the post I had written at all. I went back and re-read it just to be sure. Nope. I had not said what they thought I had. Yet other people had gotten the point. How had that happened?. The ones with the negative reactions often focused on the bad things, ignored the caveats and background info, and reacted. That was just what pressed their buttons.

For some people, The feeling was I was calling their baby ugly. No.. More like:

"Hi. I like your car" I bet that gets good gas mileage. Hey, I also like your iPhone, the case you have, the headphones, your nifty hairstyle, awsome sunglasses, and those shoes you have on. Wherever did you get those? Whats up with the socks though?"

"Socks! Why do you hate on my socks? These are my favorite socks. There are two of them and they fit my feet and ... and.... and... what is so great about your socks anyway? Have to chase that person far to get them?"

When I think about all the open source projects out there, and even just the ones here that are related to monitoring and managing systems, I sometimes wonder at all the energy that has led people to go off into so many different directions to solve the same problems. Part of it is simply that there is more than one way to solve almost anything of course. I am pretty sure that another aspect is human emotional needs entering into and interferring with the other goals of what is otherwise supposed to be an inclusive project. There seems to be a common trajectory (or maybe small set of possible trajectories) to Open Source projects. and it looks something like this:

• Someone gets an idea, or has a need and works to create a solution to it.

• They want to share their idea / solution with others

• If it catches on, sooner or later it hits critical mass and enough people are involved that they start to pull different ways. They may do this based on their own needs, their own ideas not being accepted by the core group, or suddenly thinking they have some advantage heading off in their own way. Schism. Division.

• Soon there are multiple solutions to the same problem. There are probably good things about each one, and also probably problems with each approach.

• Maturity is reached where things come back together. Or Interoperate. Or things start to die.

Here are three examples I am thinking of:

Compiz / Beryl: They split, and Compiz created Beryl in the same sense that certain greek gods used to be born, spring from the cracked skull of a parent. But now they are back together than Compis Fusion is the result. We all won on that one.

Gnome / KDE: They could not agree on a core tool set and they split, with Gnome springing from to propritary (at the time) clutches of Trolltech. They did not interoperate well at first, despite both being X applications. Later they came to a peace and found ways to let each others applications run inside their environments. Again we all won.

Evolution / KDE PIM: Evolution created the Connector. The Connector let one attach to MS Exchange. KDE updated to Kontact to do a similar trick, but stopped half way through development. Connector was open sourced, but KDE did not adopt any part of the Connector code. Kontact stayed in its half way state, while KDE focused on other things like look and feel and integration of KDE and a new major release of the desktop. No one won there. There is still only one native application way of getting at your calendar from Linux.

But I bet you could point at examples of the same thing inside of Open Systems management. What are they, and how do we head them off at the pass? How do we make sure we work together now?