An essay I wrote today on open source and feature creep:

http://harishankar.org/articles/inde...ndFeatureCreep

Thoughts, suggestions welcome, as it is still in "development". hehehe

I haven't read your report but I feel feature creep is a problem, it makes bug tracking/fixing harder for one thing, but it is getting Linux further away from the unix philosophy of one program to do one job well. We used to pipe together small programs to get results, I fear that knowledge is being lost also.

I really liked the 'strong leader' concept. Rudderless projects are bad news in any setting. We would not be having this conversation if not for Torvalds. Sort of illustrates the entire point right there.

One thing you neglected to mention though (or at least I did not notice it while skimming) is the desire to have the code compatible with newer developments elsewhere. Sometimes feature creep is not just about keeping up with the Joneses. Sometimes it is merely about retaining compatibility with the Joneses that have the latest and greatest of everything and none of it interfaces with your legacy base.