OT: Sabotage was Re: GIMP 2.8

[stan]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:21:08 -0400
Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:26:39 +0200
> Karel Volný wrote:
> 
> > I hope there doesn't exist one more step before like "in previous 
> > iteration, users were bad to us, so let's break some feature to 
> > do harm to them" :-)
> 
> I have yet another theory - what if it is deliberate sabotage
> by people who would profit from the destruction of open
> source?
> 
> http://home.comcast.net/~tomhorsley/game/gnome3-rant.html

When I started reading about grub2 (which I think should be called
lilo2), I noticed that disks still start at 0, but partitions now start
at 1 (or is it vice versa?).  Anyhow, I got this image in my head of a
bunch of Microsoft guys sitting around enjoying the snacks after a
meeting, and laughing as they thought about introducing this confusion.
One of them then suggests that in the next revision, they'll flip it so
that disks start at 1 and partitions at 0 to introduce even more
confusion. Probably pure fantasy, as entropy and 'let's write this from
scratch to improve it' is enough to explain the change and its
confusion. But whenever I see something like the grub change, or the
one described here, in a linux program, I think of that image and get a
chuckle instead of getting irate.  Well, less irate, anyway.  ;-)