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> Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 11:52:15 -0800
> From: natyoung@cisco.com
> To: elharo@metalab.unc.edu; Klaus.Backert@t-online.de
> CC: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Invitation to metadata dictionary wiki - meaningfuel.org
>
> All of this begs the question: How does it happen? Why are some traditional chair designs so uncomfortable? Why didn't e2 become wikipeida? Why didn't feeBSD take off the way linux did? And why did wikipedia and linux succeed?
>
Considering my employment situation, I'm not exactly a Linux geek so this may be clueless: Wasn't part of Linux's early value proposition the fact that it was not driven by a crowd but had a single person maintaining its conceptual integrity? Whatever conceptual integrity Unix had from being invented by two people was pretty well diluted by the time Free BSD forked off .... Also, wan't Linux originally designed specifically for X86? Focusing on the most popular processor architecture might have helped drive its success.
If I understand Len properly, crowds work well as feedback mechanisms to weed out the clever ideas that don't work and fuzz together the essentially similar ideas that do work. They also serve in some way I don't understand to create an overshoot / collapse / reinvent mechanism that one sees both in popular culture fashion and in geek chic. Maybe FreeBSD will have its day in the sun once if Apple's currently fashionable design aesthetic trumps the "crowding" that accompanied Linux's popularity.
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