I was a little surprised to read about the lengths to which people will go to be jerks to virtual strangers. I’ve tried both OpenBSD and Gentoo and didn’t find either to my liking. But hey, to each his own. I’m happy to see both these free software projects succeeding on their own terms; it never occurs to me to feel like Fedora is superior to either of them just because I prefer it. Wow, I bet I could write a whole series on blowhardism in the FOSS community!
Jeff Spaleta wrote a great post to fedora-devel-list, more or less about this very topic, that I really enjoyed reading. Maybe we should make that part of our FAQ…. In the meantime, in case folks haven’t read it, you really should pick up a copy of Karl Fogel’s book Producing Open Source Software, and pretty much read it cover-to-cover, with the possible exception of the technical bits you know. There’s some simple but insightful comments throughout on the social side of FOSS, and even someone who’s been around these here parts a whlie can benefit from them, if only as a reminder or reinforcement.