ecology

Vinay Gupta, creator of the hexayurt, writes over at over at one of his sites  a criticism of resilience:

The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution » why it’s not resilience.

Presenting this attack on the term resilience  is certainly controversial and ignites a good and much needed debate.  But we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I have recently been on the road so I've hadn't had a chance to address a posting By Dries, founder of the drupal project. Before I do, I think it might be enjoyable to provide some context on my thought about what I think are some important questions.

Ben Hyde makes an interesting point by talking about talent as a resource pool and the economic nature of talent (at least I think this issue is implied if not overtly stated).  Talent without skill and exercise, I think he argues, decays and loses all value  - and Open Source may be a "market" whereby the "talent resource" can find a sustainable way of addressing market imbalances in its acquisition (usually and unfortunately the labor market and hiring tries to do this on the software profession through the context of purchasing skills)

At FOSDEM I had the chance to sit on on a few somewhat academic discussions about FLOSS quality. It is an interesting issue for us as we have worked over the past three years to work on a type of "assemble" methodology that integrates itself into FLOSS practices, while at the same time ensures service level agreements can confidently be met in a more traditional professional services/enterprise context.A couple of thoughts really come to mind.

Remember that IBM's mantra in this was to "fulfill customer requirements." That's a clever slogan that sure sounds like it is based in six-sigma customer service, but it really isn't. That's because most customers don't really know what they want. And if you count on fulfilling these unknown and certainly un-vetted requirements as your corporate raison d'etre, well, it leads to where the company is today -- milking (and ultimately bilking) its customers.

I have always wanted to name a project or a release after this city in Jordan. The genesis of this desire is twofold. One comes from my time in the valley when we were naming releases after cities, and the other from my affection for one of my favorite films Lawrence of Arabia.

For those of you unfamiliar with one of the most beautifully cinematographic movies that I can recall, the story is something like this:

Let's look at a case study in embracing a new simplicity in design to deal with a complex problem. In this case the complex problem is traffic. It is complex because it involves many variables that are less than predictable. For example, the number of cars, the direction of the cars, the weather, pedestrians, road conditions, visibility, maintenance and state of equipment for management and so on. If we were to design a system whereby we encouraged the collaboration of different drivers to solve the problem of traffic flow we could do it in several ways. Lets study two: