First off: screw Silicon Valley. Using this as a label for the whole tech scene really has to stop. Second off: I really like the patronage idea. It feels ho

First off: screw Silicon Valley. Using this as a label for the whole tech scene really has to stop. Second off: I really like the patronage idea. It feels horribly unfair if you are NOT included, which is why it can't last in many places, but back around 2006 or so I joined Red Hat and we had the "Emerging Technologies Group" (now defunct). Basically, our group was told to go make systems management applications that made people's life easier. No plan on commercailing, and we barely conferred with each other but every 6 months or so. It was pretty amazing. Cobbler and Func came out of that, and eventually I was able to get more involved with OSS than most people do, and that led to a lot of other things later on down the line (like Ansible). I think it's a really cool idea to just find some smart people, vaguely wave at a problem, say, "go make these users really happy" with very few parameters and see what happens. I also believe in companies with a really strong vision of what they want to build, but what we miss is that some of our best designers are also the builders, and when we get one person designing and hundreds of people building, we can possibly get bloat and a bunch of untapped creative potential. The theory of the 80/20 time, that I hear seems to be a myth, is a step in the right direction.