Arranged marriages vs. Dating

How do you feel about arranged marriages? I didn't have one, so I personally don't have any experience, but my guess is that the biggest issue has got to be personality. Its not the big issues - job, family, money, background - because those are the things you can check. The details are hard to check. What if the person has a really annoying laugh? What if they snore? What if they are unreasonably grumpy until the third cup of coffee?

Another place this comes up is with mobile phones (cell phones if you are American!). Have you ever bought a mobile phone based on the specs? Yeah, sure the phone has wifi, HSDPA, touch screen, bluetooth, video, fm radio, dab tv, the works. But somehow it doesn't work out. It annoys you. To send a text message you need to navigate 3 screens. It crashes while you are in the middle of a 3 page email that you've tapped out on the screen, which just dropped 5% of your input. Its the details.

Am I going to get to the point? :-)

I was recently talking about RFIs and the RFI process. An RFI process is like an arranged marriage. It misses out the details. In fact, many RFIs give weight to the wrong aspects. But most RFIs end up finding something that sort of works. Most arranged marriages sort of work. Even cheap chinese phones sort of work. But do you want something that 'sort of works' or do you want something better? Yeah - you want an iPhone, you want true love. You want someone who is going to grow with you.

This is the difference between the Open Source model and the RFI model. In the Open Source model, the user dates the software. They download it. They try it out. You build something. You find out the quirks. You understand if they are things you can live with or not. When you date someone, you get to influence them before you commit. In Open Source you contribute to improve the software to fit your needs, whether its suggestions, requirements or actual code. And by the time you look to pay for support, you know whether its right for you or not.

Of course arranged marriages have their benefits, and so do RFIs. Nothing is black and white. But my experience is that more Open Source projects really succeed and leave happy users than RFI projects.