If the glass slipper fits

It's been an extremely busy and travel-heavy couple of weeks and blogging output has clearly suffered.  For some reason, I have trouble writing unless I'm sitting at a proper desk, so all the time spent in airplanes and airports recently just hasn't been conducive to writing.  It's good to be back on the ground for a while.

This week's column comments on what I see as an unnecessarily defensive posture among open source advocates:

After two years of writing this column, one theme in the feedback I receive from readers stands out. Regardless of what I write, I get at least a few e-mails saying, "You're short-changing open source." In my day-to-day IT reality, open source technologies play a central role: infoworld.com runs Linux/Apache, I use MySQL inside and outside of work for fun, and I keep up with less-hyped but mature technologies such as FreeBSD and PostgresSQL. I've been a Linux user since 1994. All that aside, what really interests me about these e-mails is the notion that the open source community continues to see itself as the Cinderella held back by an assortment of wicked stepmothers, principally Microsoft. From my vantage point, the opposite is true. Open source is the belle of the ball. The open source pumpkin has changed into a carriage and Cinderella is dancing with Prince Charming -- but the night is still young.  [full text here]

Some open source advocates remind me of underground music fans.  We've all known someone who was a big fan of a relatively unknown underground band that became more mainstream (Nirvana, for example).  As soon as the rest of the world catches up to the greatness of this unknown band, the earlier fans grow uncomfortable with the band's mainstream success and they either move on to a new stable of obscure bands, or they relentlessly remind you of how they were there at the beginning.   (And yes, I did note in my column that I've been using Linux since almost the beginning, so hey, I'm guilty to some degree myself.)  Of course, these advocates do serve a valuable function -- making sure that no one forgets the humble origins of the band and how long and hard they had to scrap to make it to the top (at least in pre-American Idol days, that was true).   Regardless of how successful Linux, MySQL, et. al. get, we certainly do need people to remind us how these things came to be.