Tuesday, December 02, 2008  Open Source fragmentation and
cognitive biases  I've just finished Predictably Irrational (it
was nice, many of the of the theses I already knew from Internet
articles - so it was not ground-breaking for me, but still I
learned from it). In the seventh chapter of this book entitled
"The High Price of Ownership" the author presents some
surprising stories about how we "overvalue what we have".
Apparently we all give much more value to things that we posses
then to those that we could potentially have - this is a common
cognitive bias.  This made me thinking. Wouldn't that explain
the fragmentation of Open Source libraries (and CPAN in
particular)? Would that not explain why one author values the
miniature efficiency gains of his reinvented wheel over the
robustness of time-tested code?  Maybe once we know how this
mechanis works, we could design better Open Source library
repositories, limitting the power of that fragmentation drive?
Maybe by being more explicite about our choices w