[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“How about those in the FSF, Debian and the LDP? Why?
Doesn’t their insistence that the only viable software worthy of
consideration depends on specific flavors of legal jargon only feed
Redmond? How about engineers at RedHat, SuSE and Mandrake who
see fit to relocate packages and kernel patches ad-hoc to force
their market share?”
“However noble and commendable their efforts in principle,
however vital their efforts have been to get us this far, all
groups who expend their energies to divide and partition the only
viable desktop alternative and to discount functionally acceptably
means on political grounds, all of them fuel and sustain what has
now been injected into our popular parlance as the “applications
barrier.”
“Do those who work to divide Linux from BSD, who divide
opensource from free software and free software from proprietary,
who divide Gnome from KDE and KDE from other X platforms, do all of
them work to perpetuate Microsoft? And I am not just talking about
the testosterone powered zealots, but also those who craft APIs
which bind their applications to single Unix or even Linux
subspecies; yes some of it is unavoidable, but is all of it? How
about AOL? Was Mozilla a desperate SOS, corked in a bottle as
pirates boarded their ship, an artifact the rest of us now admire
as a fine piece of glassware instead of popping it open?”