Yes, when people discuss and work together on common goals, some amazing things can happen. Though, I totally understand how competition can spur along amazing things too

And, yes, we need that shirt! We have at least two customers right here.

A few years ago there was a massive proliferation of Python web frameworks and there was plenty of discussion about which was best etc. There were benchmarks and discussions about scalability, and as surprising thing happened. Some people started working together to create more fair and accurate benchmarks and realised how many common goals and opinions they shared and eventually three major frameworks (Pylons, Turbogears and Repoze) merged.

Another thing that struck me after reading your post was how valuable directed and constructive public technical feedback is for everyone. I feel I learn a lot from this when it is done well e.g. on mailing lists.

One final comment: something which I don’t really understand is how there seems to be many people who feel that they are doing the FLOSS community a great service by picking out projects to ridicule and criticise. It is as if they feel they are doing investigative journalism and exposing some “fraudulent” project for claiming to be useful by its very existence (I’m thinking of the recent backlash against the Novacut editor project). I think that kind of criticism is fine for commercial products and services, but for FLOSS I feel it would be nice if people stood back a little and remembered, as you so eloquently point out, that “Open source is made of people”. (I totally want that on a t-shirt!)