Open Source Development - The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

Subversion developers Ben Collins Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick in a talk titled How Open Source Projects Can Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too) (Google Video) stress the need to avoid analysis paralysis . One of the ways paralysis is caused, explain the developers, is the attitude of perfectionists that makes them indulge in endless technical discussions on mailing lists - this includes seemingly interminable discussions on even minor details; The 'Painting the Bikeshed' analogy by Poul-Henning Kemp illustrates this point. As Ben and Fitz put it in the presentation, "The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good".

I wonder if that's the reason they have put up with WebDAV for so long ;-)