The Bikeshed email — PHKs Bikeshed

In 1999, a de facto spiritual leader of the FreeBSD project took on the responsibility of addressing serious issues within the project through email-missives. One particular event on the mailing lists infuriated the individual so much that it took days for them to calm down and express their thoughts coherently. This incident inspired the creation of an email to the FreeBSD crew, which had a far greater impact than anticipated.

Initially, it merely introduced the term "bikeshed" as a yellow card in the FreeBSD vocabulary. However, it gradually spread and became widely used across various computing communities. The original T-shirts, featuring the bikeshed motif, were designed by the individual and made by a small embroidery shop nearby. Despite the opportunity to differentiate the bikeshed colors on each T-shirt, the individual realized it later and felt it could have been an improvement.

The T-shirts gained popularity and can still be purchased on various web-shops today. The bikeshed meme gained further traction when Subversion project members Ben and Brian incorporated it into their talk "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People." This talk marked a significant watershed in FOSS history, as it was the first time tangible strategies for managing the unique challenges of FOSS projects were suggested.

Before this talk, the "herding cats" metaphor was commonly used to express resignation towards the management problems in FOSS projects. The talk resonated with the individual's previous experiences, as they had faced similar issues themselves. However, when they spoke to old core.0 colleagues, the common response was "yeah, we knew that" because they had encountered the same challenges in the past decade.

The individual felt that Ben and Brian successfully brought the human aspect of FOSS project management out of the shadows and made it respectable. The individual believes that Ben and Brian missed an important insight: the "Goodbye & Good Luck" force multiplier. In cases where disagreements about strategic direction arise on open-source projects, it may be more beneficial to part ways and pursue separate projects rather than staying together and fighting.

The OpenBSD project serves as a notable example of this proposition. Theo Håstad, the core figure behind OpenBSD, would have likely fragmented NetBSD if given the chance, and he almost did before being removed from the project. Nevertheless, after the split, OpenBSD made significant contributions to FOSS, notably delivering important security code such as OpenSSH.

The individual had hoped that a similar outcome would occur when Matt Dillon was eventually removed from FreeBSD, but DragonflyBSD has not lived up to expectations in this regard. Recently, Google introduced a feature that suggests "People also search for" when a person's name is searched. In this case, the suggestion for a dinner-party conversation is the "bikeshed" meme, which has become an utterly awesome topic of discussion.