If you work on amplicon based microbial community analysis this is definitely worth a read.
It is by Greg Caporaso in response to an article by Robert Edgar. I don’t want to get into the scientific discussion here but I encourage people to read his post.
One thing I do want to get into, I do think the issue of “openness” or tools and software raised by Caporaso is really important and worth thinking about. Tools like QIIME and MOTHUR and such are generally open while those of Edgar are generally not (e.g., see some of the discussion of this Storify I wrote for a talk Edgar gave at #UCDavis last year: Robert Edgar at #UCDavis: not metagenomics, not humble, not open.
Update: March 28th, 2018
Since Storify is disappearing soon, we have converted this Storify into a Wakelet and are embedding it here