Diversity and tolerance

Diversity and variety. Everybody loves them, and even those who don't are sometimes forced to do so. However, there is a problem. Our culture (the Western culture) is not very diversity-friendly. It has always cherished the idea of the one and only. We have monogamy, monotheism – in all but the weirdest competitions, there can only be one winner.

The one and only. Those are the words that are so anti-diversity you really want to avoid them if you want to seem like supporting diversity. But some people still say things like:

We believe a linux distribution should reflect open source diversity. Mandriva Linux is the only distribution including both KDE (4.3.2), GNOME (2.28.1) all integrated.

The contradiction is clear. "Mandriva (a commercial Linux provider) is the only distribution including, yada yada" despite the fact that "a linux distribution should reflect open source diversity". Besides, I don't know if I understand the word integrated correctly, but I believe openSUSE is another Linux distro that has both KDE and GNOME, and more.

So not only they are contradicting themselves, but they also told a little lie.

Being a big fan of open-source software, I can tell you that diversity in the open-source ecosystem is much more than one provider or the other boasting a feature nobody has at the expense of others. There is no only one, or the first (except historically, of course), or best. There is we who make software, and we who use software. Every piece of software I've ever tried had some features nobody else had not because they're the coolest of the gang, but because they had a different philosophy – they wanted a feature like that because nobody else wanted to implement it (for better or worse).

The problem here is very simple. The guy that whore the copy simply didn't feel the diversity. Or the corporate bosses imposed their own world-view on the copywriter. Either way, the true feeling of diversity and openness did not even reach the tip of the pen. Honesty is by far the best asset in any copy. Don't glorify yourself, don't diminish your achievements. Just tell it like it is. Or else you'll end up like the emperor with his new suit sooner or later.