in relation to Open Source and open standards.
This might not exactly be news for those of us in the trenches, for it provides some interesting insights for non-nerd-types.
So here I am, sleeping away a perfectly fine Hill Country early summer morning, and I hear this, apparently right outside the bedroom window. Well, if you want to get a look at one of the fawns, you generally have to be quick about it -- once they detect noise, Mom puts tail-up and they're outta there. So I roll over and hear 'ftoom, ftoom, ftoom'. Gone. OK, show's over, back to bed.
'Naaaaah!'
WTF? Still there? Ouch! Somehow it's managed to stick its head into a hole in the wire fence nearby -- into, but not out of. Oh boy. I run up there. It's really twisted up (both legs around the ears, apparently to try to push the wire away.) Can I manually move the wire? Nope, not enough. 'Fttttm'. Yes, Mom, I hear you nearby. Run back to the house. 'Naaaaaaaah!' Yeah, I know, you want Mom and are in mortal terror. Back with small wireclippers. Don't struggle, critter, you're just hurting yourself. I know, it's just instinct. Dammit! No go. Off to the shop for the Big wire cutters. Damn, that hill's steep. OK, OK, calm down, let's free those legs. Ah, ok, they aren't tangled, that's good. How about a cut here? No? Here? No? H .... (whoosh. gone). Phew.
They're pretty, but they're not so smart. At least this one will end up in a better place than that one that was in the middle of Cuernavaca yesterday. A few abrasions should be survivable. As for ever wanting anything to do with humans again? ... Naaaaah.
is Microsoft itself, as it decides to completely rewrite Windows.
For those outside the software engineering communities, here's the clue: there is one, and only one, way to destroy a great product -- and that's to rewrite it from scratch. And the larger the product (Windows is immense), the longer and larger a failure the effort will be. This has been true of every 'large' software project since the early 1960s.
Wow.