FOB

This weird little rant was written some time ago, and I've forgotten what inspired it. I find that I still believe everything I said, though, so I thought I might as well put it up. Enjoy.

The technical meritocracy that is open source at its best does an amazing job of running the administrative and political side of projects without compromising their technological worth.

At its worst, those without the finely honed technical skills to participate fairly in technical merit governance insinuate themselves into open source leadership positions anyhow. The results of this are often horrible.

Please don't kill something you don't understand, whether you mean well or not. If you are unequipped to take a technical leadership role in an open source project, you are unequipped to take any leadership role in that project. For the sake of the project, recognize it and move aside. Respect open source, and the open source way. It's better than you know.

I wrote the first part of this about a year ago, soon after I got tenure. I got bogged down and it remained unfinished until now. Enjoy.

So I have this job where after a set period of time—in my case, 6 years—my employer had to make a decision either to fire me, or to promise never to fire me. The latter thing is called "tenure", and seems to be pretty widely misunderstood. This note may help clear up some of the confusion…