I believe that there are even cases of echo chambers for systems software out there. For example, the database community is pretty tight with a center of gravit

I believe that there are even cases of echo chambers for systems software out there. For example, the database community is pretty tight with a center of gravity around Stonebraker (Postgres, Vertica for columnar stores, voltdb for NewSQL dbs). Well, there's a DB out there for OLTP workloads called NDB (MySQL Cluster) and not only is it the fastest in the world (200m transactions/sec on commodity hardware), but it is also GPL-v2 licensed. But, it's completely unknown in the valley. And when evidence is presented about it it, the evidence is ignored and conflated "in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined" Reference: http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.se/2015/03/200m-reads-per-second-in-mysql-cluster.html http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.se/2015/03/200m-reads-per-sec...