My adversary even responded to my email which ended with "I think it’s time to stop this". I replied with an email saying "But I am going to get the last word". He replied to this as well.

He’s turning out to be quite a nice guy; he’s accused me of "displaying an incredible ignorance of the FLOSS community" — my reply was that I just didn’t know what the acronym was and that this was probably a good thing.

Although, I’m really quite warming to the guy, there is a problem here. I like to witness the development of a community, but in many cases this seems to result in introversion and worse still exclusion. Regularly developing a pile of acronyms, like the tendency to generate new jargon in science, just services to exclude people. Having switched between quite a few different disciplines, I’ve been on the wrong end of this tendency to find a clear reason why someone else doesn’t belong. "Ah, but our community isn’t like that", "We’re not the same as them though, so how can their solutions be of value?", "But you don’t understand how we do things". It’s a shame and it saddens me that people who are essentially good should still fall prey to it.

Originally published on my old blog site.