The state of the Onion

As usual, a must read. The State of the Onion n. 9 is here.

Favorite quotes:

Wu-Li isn’t actually Chinese. He only thinks he’s Chinese because when he was young his parents told him that every third child born into the world was Chinese, and he was a third child.

and another:

As I was thinking about the intelligence community and its recent obvious failures, it kinda put a new spin onto the phrase, “Information wants to be free,” or my own version of it, which is that “Information wants to be useful.”

and this rings some bells:

We often think that intelligence failures are caused by having too little information. But often, in retrospect, we find that the problem is too much information, and that in fact, we had the data available to us, if only it had been analyzed correctly.

So I’m just wondering if we’re getting ourselves into a similar situation with open source software. More software is not always better software. Google notwithstanding, I think it’s actually getting harder and harder over time to find that nugget you’re looking for. This process of re-inventing the wheel makes better wheels, but we’re running the risk of getting buried under a lot of half-built wheels.