[ale] BP knew of problems 11 months before the rig blew

[Jim Kinney]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 9:54 AM, Jerald Sheets <questy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Seriously...
>
> This conversation needs to die.
>


Actually it doesn't. It is directly related to Linux and here's the link:

Our beloved kernel and overall general software package collection was
developed using a philosophy of openness, of transparency. It is not perfect
as a process but it does allow for fundamental failure points to be
corrected usually before implementation. We, the OpenSource community, quite
loudly proclaim the "Many Eyes Theory" to be a crucial principle in the
success of our process and also that is the cornerstone of the next
generation of development processes.

I firmly believe with as close to a religious conviction as I can get that
this principle is valid and will ultimately stand the test of time.

As has been uncovered in the New York Times article that led off this
thread, BP has not been practicing and degree of openness or transparency.
It is an easy conjecture that had they been required to be fully open and
transparent we would very likely not be having this discussion at all.
Someone in the "Many Eyes" group would have caught the problems and raised a
red flag. The assumption here is that management at BP would be listening to
that peer review process. If they were fully cognizant of the benefits of
the process and intelligent enough to put them into practice, then I suspect
they would have listened.

So OpenSource principles are beneficial for (almost) all processes. It is,
in effect, the cornerstone of our society and particularly our governing
process (open debate, elections of project leaders, etc. all sound very much
GNU to me). So why are we not able to make the next great leap forward
societally and fully embrace the Open Source principles and transform our
society from a lordship, power domination by resource control to a
meritocracy similar to how our OS is built.

Oh. Because proprietary, feudalism business mentality won't just roll over
and die. We will have to continue to develop our process and expand it's
base until there is nothing left to feud over.

Total World Domination.

That's why this conversation mustn't die. As long as there are BP's out
there we will keep having this conversation. :-)

-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20100601/97538fec/attachment.html