I think helps a lot to give clarity and focus to ideas when the 'idea maker' doesn't have enough power to 'force' their execution (or adoption)
I've talked about this before in You will not have your best ideas when you are in a position of Power and it is something that more and more fell that is needed.
As somebody who has a lot of opinions and ideas (see I wish that OWASP in 2014 ....) I think it is very healthy that once I Stepped down as Board Member I was able to (eventually) write freely about An Idea of a new model for OWASP
The same applies to the O2 Platform which I've been working on for the past 5 years. As I mention in Where Is .NET Headed? and the cost for Microsoft of ignoring the O2 Platform and Responding to Andrew's O2 Platform feedback on the OWASP Leaders list I still think that the O2 Platform has a huge amount of innovation and great ideas for Application Security and development.
But isn't the O2 Platform really hard to use? Yes, and part of the reason is that it has been designed to 'allow problems to be solved' not to 'work outside of the box'.
That said there are quite a lot of examples out there on to use it, this post for example 'How to start using the O2 Platform and its scripting capabilities?' (and how I used the O2 Platform to solve a hard integration problem in May 2013) shows the O2 Platform's powerful scripting capabilities, here are 39 videos and here is the begining of a book on the O2 Platform web scripting capabilties.
So in a weird way, I think it has been quite healthy for the O2 Platform to have a slow (but steady) adoption, since that means that its growth is quite solid and based on real merit and added-value (ironically the lack of real users also allowed me to make major changes to O2's architecture and APIs which would had been very hard to do if its user-base quite large (for example the FluentSharp API's would probably never had existed with the ability to perform major refactorings to the O2 Platform codebase).
The bottom line is that in the inter-connected world we had today, good ideas and tools will always have the opportunity to grow organically (linearly or exponentially). And a great idea, is one that will eventually reach exponential effects (where most of the growth happens in the last iterations ( see Chapter 3: Exponential Growth)), so in a way, what really matters is what part of the exponential curve some of my ideas currently are? :)
