We've got a couple of gorillas holding back innovation. Microsoft is a big intellectual roach motel. All the big minds go in and they don't come out.

Of course Saffo doesn't address the question of what alternatives the big minds have. If they want to work at a software products company and have a reasonable chance of getting their creation into the hands of customers, the choices pretty much boil down to Microsoft or some company that is likely to be put out of business soon by Microsoft.

All of the open source communities (and yes, there is more than one) collectively can provide the chance to get good ideas into a bunch of products that have the potential to be as good as what Microsoft is doing now. The problem is the community isn't co-ordinated, and has limited resources (at least as far as big minds are concerned). It seems to me that the question that the open source movement needs answer is: What does it take for open source to become an intellectual roach motel? How can we make it compelling for "big minds" to come in, and never want to go back out?

So the trick is to create an environment where people understand what's expected of them as far as limits to their behavior, and then get out of the way unless they violate those limitations.

the user has the right to use a service in the way that makes them happy as long as the owner gives them access to the service.

the owner has the right to refuse to allow a user to use a service if the way they use it is against the owner's wishes.

the owner has the responsibilty to deineate those rules and restrictions as simply and understandably as they can, and an implied responsibility to not set unneccessary and arbitrary restrictions.

users have the responsibilty to accept and abide by restrictions or not use the service.

And like the person who refuses to turn off the boom box in the restaurant when asked, users that won't accept the rules will find themselves escorted off the premises, to prevent them from ruining the dining of the rest of the customers.

The group is more important than the individual. And the individual that does not accept that is not welcome in the group....

Just so you SharpReader users know, the latest version of SharpReader is 0.9.2.1. The Aggregators statistics on my HTML blog page show that lots of you are several versions behind...