After some reflection on the question
and watching the antics of the participants, I would say: No. This is not a matter of eating our own. This is a matter of people taking themselves entirely too seriously. That may be a problem indigenous to IT and related.
Some people who spend a lot of time jockeying computers and networks tend to believe that their specialized knowledge and/or authority makes them a lot smarter and more powerful than the rest of the populace. A lot of the time that's just believing their own press clippings, but they still get their feathers up if contradicted or challanged. If you bang a lot of these brittle egos together, sometimes you get breakage.
As far as I can see, there was no real point to any of this. Karsten was apparently being typical Karsten: Rules and conventions must be strictly obeyed whey they are convienient to him, otherwise the preoccupation with rules and conventions do not sit easily on the creative mind. He has been consistantly like that since I have been hanging around on this and the preceeding boards. No suprises here. He did something arbitrary and was called on it. I'm still not shocked. There was a brief round of apologies. Ok, that's seriously different, but not shocking. Then Karsten takes his marbles and leaves with the subsequent shit storm and here we are. In a reasonable social environment, the participants would have had their spat, told each other to fuck off, and hang it up for the night. The next day or whenever, the participants come to conclusions in a less emotional state and get back to business. This could still be happening here but the 'whenever' timeframe is considerably longer than what I would consider normal. This is still not "IT eating its own". It appears to be simply personal inflexibility in action. It is difficult to have a non-trivial interaction between people when everybody is too fragile to ever be wrong.
My 0.02
Hugh
