1+1 = i

I need to stop talking to reporters. It's so easy for what results to get misunderstood. I was not trying to say that all open source projects are chaotic: there is a spectrum. Apache is at the very high end of the scale, on average exhibiting excellent behaviour. Their governence rules are very effective. Apache and the Linux kernel set the Gold Standard. But they aren't all of the open source universe, and there's some decidedly oddball behaviour that goes on. The problem is that it's often the crazy behavior that becomes publicly visible and it tarnishes everything. When I made the comment that got so misunderstood I was talking about the perception of the open source community by outsiders.

Even at the Gold Standard end of the scale there are problems. Take a recent event: the blowup between Linus and the Bitkeeper folks: while I'd bet real money that Linus did the Right Thing, the way it played out in the press looked pretty bad. It may have been impossible to play it out at any lower flame temperature, but somehow the community needs to come to grips with how it is percieved

June 17, 2005