Perhaps it's worth considering that maybe the reason that checklists aren't the norm in the FOSS "meritocracy" is that they hinder progress, for a certain value of progress. Maybe there was a stealth project that could have been OpenSSL, developed with scrict adherance to checklists, but OpenSSL won because it didn't have that burden? I suspect this applies more broadly to startups, too.
Maybe checklists are a silent killer in the natural selection of the software ecosystem, and that's why so much of our software is tripping over peacock feathers?
Perhaps it's worth considering that maybe the reason that checklists aren't the norm in the FOSS "meritocracy" is that they hinder progress, for a certain value of progress. Maybe there was a stealth project that could have been OpenSSL, developed with scrict adherance to checklists, but OpenSSL won because it didn't have that burden? I suspect this applies more broadly to startups, too.
Maybe checklists are a silent killer in the natural selection of the software ecosystem, and that's why so much of our software is tripping over peacock feathers?
Just a thought.