Talks/accepted/apathy-and-my-pet-project.md

Apathy, and "My Pet Project"

contact: : dvn

I see two systemic behaviours in the broad hacker community, which consistantly stifle progress, and I don't think it has to be this way. Whether it's giving up on private communication due to societal pressure, or growing jaded from investing all your time into developing proprietary software for an ungrateful company, apathy is a grating force in open source communities. The second, and an arguabely bigger problem, is what I'm calling the "Pet Project" syndrome. People grow to love a software project like their own child, and often end up favouring, and defending it like it's their own child. This causes people to close their eyes to solutions others have already found, and creates a lot of parallel work.

I'd like to collaboratively discuss these issues, provide some examples, and maybe we can discover some solutions.