Reading a post about the technology religion surrounding use of the .local suffix on Small Business Server boxes got me thinking about the psychology behind the debate. As someone who has switched sides on the debate, I think maybe I can offer some insight.
I used to be opposed to the .local thing too. The SBS community has turned me to the dark side and now I use .local along with everyone else, but it took a big leap of faith for me to do that.
With the benefit of calm reflective hindsight, I think the reason I used to oppose .local is because of the different mindset I have coming from a software engineering background vs. an IT admin background. I am something of a perfectionist and I find it extremely hard to start on anything unless I can envisage a successful outcome. I think this is a trait common to a lot of software engineers, though the outward manifestation of this trait is not always easy to spot. Obsessive exactness is part of what makes a good software engineer. I think with IT admins, tomorrow is another day. We don't worry too much about tomorrow. We are much more willing to take the path of least resistance and do whatever fixes the problem _now_. A software engineer, on the other hand, is accustomed to trying to analyse all the consequences and potential pitfalls that might happen now or in the future, ever. If you will indulge me in a sweeping generalization, I think this is why software engineers seem to have no personality: because their brains are stuck in loops trying to analyze minutia that everyone else has already forgotten about. I have in my mind the image of Robbie the Robot from the movie Forbidden Planet, upon being ordered to shoot one of the guests. Pffsszzzt! Does not compute! I suffer from this affliction myself and often it stops me doing simple ordinary little jobs that a less analytical person would "just do". In some ways, it is a handicap. But you need that to be a software engineer.
So this is the problem with .local - once you name your SBS domain, you can't change it, ever. So you'd better pick something that will never break. To a software engineer, this is an immutable law of software design - if there is a non zero chance of something happening, then it is certain to happen _eventually_. In software terms, when you're talking about MIPS, that usually means it will happen in the next ten minutes. The argument doesn't really scale well to months or years, but to a software engineer the same principle applies - if there is a way for your SBS network to break, then it is going to break. Now there is already one instance where .local causes problems - if you have a Macintosh on your network. How do you know you will never need to add a Mac to your network? How do you know that the internet powers-that-be will not decide to use .local as a top level domain? It is such an abvious thing to choose that someone else is bound to decide to use it for something that conflicts with SBS. To an engineering type, this all ads up to a mental blue screen of death. The difficult thing for an engineer to accept is that at some point, far far away into the future, it doesn't really matter any more and you can safely ignore the consequences.
So try not to be too harsh on the software engineers when they seem to be pig-headed about something like this. The chances are, they've spotted a potential problem that you haven't seen and they are trying to help you avoid it.