community discussion && the color of the bikeshed
Have you ever been frustrated by these never-ending discussions on a simple issue in a mailing list or forum? Like this flamewar on the ubuntu-discuss-devel mailing list about whether or not put back the backspace keyboard shortcut to go back in history in Firefox? Probably often. People keep fighting over and over, repeating the same arguments, and this often end as statu quo. Welcome to the FOSS world, when everyone can say its word.
And today I discovered this phenomenon has a name: The “color of the bikeshed” (described in the FreeBSD FAQ and in wikipedia). Basically it says that on technically complex issues, even important ones (e.g. a nuclear plant proposal), people fall back on the assumption that someone else understand and handle the issue, so they won’t question. But on very simple issues that everyone understand (e.g. the color of the bikeshed), everyone wants its input to be heard. Everyone wants to be noticed, to show he is participating and handling the situation, to flatter his ergo.
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