Re: Please remember that geeks have their own social mores.

[sundialsvc4]

I am very reluctant to typecast anyone, let alone big- and easily-defined groups of people like “all OSS developers.”

Some developers are social butterflies; others are social caterpillars. Many of these folks are geniuses, but some are just persistent and meticulous.

Let us also not forget the people who finish the HOWTO's that otherwise end abruptly about two-thirds of the way through, where the “genius” lost interest in what s/he was doing. Let's not forget the testers, automated and otherwise. All those “pedantic people,” maybe-genius (probably!) but maybe-not. We could not do without them either. It takes all kinds, each one dedicated to their chosen task. After all, a lot of the task of “writing great software” is a crashing bore.

Within the large open-source projects, such as the Apache Foundation, you will actually find an extensive management-structure and very strict rules for how the group conducts itself. The Linux kernel-development group is similarly tightly-structured. There's solid reasoning for that. When you look at OSS, it's actually a big and diverse group: it's not all iconoclasts and social-muffins.

Giggle all you want to about “pointy-haired bosses,” but the best OSS projects have very strong project management. You need look no farther than the OSS project nearest and dearest to us: Perl itself.