[Community-news] where is Walter?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:58 AM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Chris Preimesberger
>  <cpreimesberger at comcast.net> wrote:
>  > Walter, you have been a shining light of good information for all this
>  >  time, and it's sad to see you pull away from the project.  Sad to see
>  >  the project melting away, too -- at least that's my impression.
>  >
>
>  One standard thing I have seen is that every project goes through
>  these cycles. Developers/leaders leave a company, project or group
>  and the people who identified the project with those people post that
>  the project as "shriveling up and dying". I remember people saying
>  this of Debian, early Linux kernel development, Red Hat, SuSE, GNOME,
>  KDE, etc. Sometimes its true, but mostly its a gut reaction because
>  our brains are wired to identify with 'leaders' for our survival. If
>  our leaders leave the tribe.. we should go with them. Its a deep urge
>  we all have but it is rarely rooted in 'reality' but in the minds way
>  of coming up with 'reasons'.
>
>  I am just commenting on this because its something I have seen over
>  and over again with companies, projects, and groups.. and it
>  interested me why one day I was all happy to be working for a company
>  and 2 days later was ready to leave because it was going to crap when
>  a developer I worked under left.
>
>  The big thing I learned was that companies, projects, groups, etc
>  change constantly, and people who thrive under some conditions
>  deteriorate under others.. and have to leave. And when that happens,
>  there are a lot of psychological shifts in the group where other
>  people stay and leave because various 'leaders' stayed or left.. in
>  some cases you end up with large scisms where people will no longer
>  talk with each other, and in other cases you have people agreeing to
>  disagree on where each group is going.
>

On the other hand, comments from the AP article can make me eat crow :)

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hXa0O9XLMsWfaqt-sI9FqFy2IewgD9074MH82

For about a year, however, Microsoft has been working to get a
slimmed-down version of Windows to run on XO laptops. As a result,
Negroponte said Tuesday that he expects XOs to soon have a "dual-boot"
option, meaning users would be able to run Windows or Sugar.

One current hang-up is whether the necessary hardware would add $7 to
$12 to an XO's cost, taking the project even further away from its
eventual goal of producing the machines for less than $100.
Eventually, Negroponte added, Windows might be the sole operating
system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"