The fight is so bitter because the stakes are so small

Every time I have to read a Nick Petreley article, I approach it with a sense of trepidation: will it have a reasoned opinion, or will it be full of bile? Well, this week it’s bile.

I wasn’t able to come up with a response, mostly because half of the article is an extended ad hominem attack on the GNOME developers, particularly Havoc and the UI team. Michael Hall, however, has a much more reasoned review in the most recent Server Watch: Enterprise Unix Roundup article. In the past, he’s provided a similarly nuanced, logical approach to the interminable desktop wars and other flammable software subjects.

I’m afraid I don’t have much else to say on the subject, aside from, well… illogical ad-hominem attacks on people who’ve never done anything bad to me and whom I have never met, and whose software is in fact a perfectly lovely alternative to what I happen to prefer. As they say in academia, the fight is so bitter because the stakes are so small.