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Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 19:20:30 -0700
From: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>
To: Miles Lane <miles@megapathdsl.net>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE New Open Source X server
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On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 09:56:03PM -0400, Scott Prader wrote:
> [much stuff about X]

Scott, I think in part what people are reacting to is the "Hi, I'm going
to start a new project, it will be cool, you should come work on it".
Forgive me if I got it wrong, I'm paraphrasing, but wasn't it something
like that what you said?

Here's my two cents on why you got the reaction you got.  Reality is
settling in.  I think people ar becoming aware that there aren't really
18,000 projects with 145,000 developers all hacking away on SourceForge.
Think about it - Red Hat comes with about 900 rpms.  So what's in
the other 17,100 projects?  The point being that while those projects
numbers sound impressive, I think we all know that 95% of them aren't
going anywhere.

In other words, what the world does not need is another project.  What
the world does need is people who roll up their sleeves and do real work.
You may well be one of them, that would be cool.  But what would be even
cooler is if we join together on real, existing efforts and work on them
rather than just constantly make up a new project.  Yeah, it's a lot harder,
you have to put at least part of your ego aside and accept someone else's 
leadership, but more gets done that way.

If you are still reading, my advice is to have a beer, relax, and ask
yourself which is more cool - a new project with about 1/100 chance
of going somewhere or contributing much more than 1/100 to an existing
project with proven track record.

Besides, there are some sharp cookies over there in X land, you are more
likely to have fun working with them.

> "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tuna fish." -unknown

I am 99.9% sure that Kirk McKusick put that in the BSD man page.
If it wasn't him I'll bet it was Bostic or Joy, but my bet is on Kirk,
he wrote UFS.  Someone at Sun took it out, and I put it back in in SunOS
4.1.1 in the tunefs.8 man page with the following comment above it (yeah,
I really did spell daemon the wrong way, shame on me):

.\" Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until
.\" the time_t's wrap around.
.sp
You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 
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