I witnessed the whole thing, from its start to its death. Your article is exactly right. It was dead from the inception and IBM seemed to be the last group to accept this. It was kicked off in late 2005, and even people on the team new it was dead by mid 2006. IBM simply refused to take the lead even though they had successfully gathered a number of open-minded partners. From the inception, they ignored and mocked common sense, grass roots, open source development. They refused correction. They refused to be competitive. Very little code was ever developed. And most of the Aperi milestones were political, with no real goal of contributing to the storage development community.

For those leading the project, it was more of a stepping stone to more significant projects... Those that originally came up with Aperi were gone from the project within 5 months. They made their splash and reaped the rewards well before the project had a chance to bear fruit.. well before the project even had a plan of execution.

There's something wrong with a system that rewards ineffectiveness with greater opportunities to be ineffective. Then again, we are seeing that very paradigm play out in the financial sector and thus the economy at large - so how can we blame Aperi for following suit. It's a cultural problem in American business that Mr. Market is finally correcting.

Fortunately, there's always tomorrow, so it's good that IBM finally decided to cut its losses - something I personally told them to do two years ago.

"It's a cultural problem in American business that Mr. Market is finally correcting." Unfortunately, governments everywhere are not allowing the correction to take place. So, instead of a great deal of relatively short term pain there will be a whole lot 'a long term pain. But most importantly it will not be felt by the wealthy and powerful (those who make huge contributions to political fund raisers and, of course, bribery), as we the middle class are paying for those mistakes. The revolution will come, its just a matter of time.