But there are so many reasons not to have everything centered on one person. Most of all because if she gets hit by a truck, everything you’ve built goes down the drain. However, I also think that there is an incubation period where you need the solid leadership of one or two visionaries who can build the effort into something that other people would even want to support and create a structure to keep the values intact while also evolving.

A brilliant OS indeed; it really has incredible potential in the open source movement. Thanks for the appreciation.

I installed Breezy Badger the other day (on nonstandard hardware, granted) and the system kept freezing. Here’s hoping I have better luck with Dapper Drake.

I agree with you on that one. Mayberry is a myth. It’s a created mythological construct, like so many fairy tales and sixties television shows, of how we’d like life to be. In true American style, you can only see utopia when you’re hunkered down in from of your pretty glowing television set.

Here is the definition of Machiavellian from Wikipedia.
“Machiavellianism is the term some social and personality psychologists use to describe a person’s tendency to deceive and manipulate others for gain.”

In this quoted phrase, “Mayberry Machiavellian” I heard it as a description of manipulators using the lie of a perfect small town to manipulate fools. Those perfect small towns only existed on TV, IMHO.

The title reminded me of a column I wrote a couple of weeks back for the Daily Tar Heel about Chapel Hill politics and how I miss Mayberry, which I’ll shamelessly plug.