Hi Nat. Thanks for replying (and I hope I didn’t annoy you too much with my post above – which I actually never expected you or anyone else of consequence to read, geez, you can’t even dis someone on the internet these days 😉 – and you’ll read this reply).

I don’t want to make a large discussion, out of this (blog comments are the wrong place IMO for serious discussions), but a few points none-the-less:

* Regarding security – All the points you discussed here are good and valid, except – again, in my opinion – the first one, which is valid but not a good one. I think the small user base should never be raised as a security benefit of Linux, at least not if anyone has any hope and one time for the Linux user base to be large – and definetly not raised as the first point. In your interview you described it as the 1st and foremost benefit of Linux security profile, with AppArmor/SELinux/whatever being only secondary issues which aren’t as important. IMO most people listening would take from your answer that “Linux is only marginally more secured then competing OSs as long as it has a small user base. I better not hop on then”.

* Graphics effects are good! yes, well. It was until compiz/mesa/X was broken in one of the updates I installed 🙁 . Anyway, my current main gripe with XGL is that its complex, has no chance of making it into the main X.org tree but still “Good Enough(tm)” which means its not likely to be replaced soon. The way I understand the OpenSource development scenario, is that as something becomes good enough and grabs a significant mind share (which XGL has thanks to Novell) the less likely it is to be replaced with something which is “The Right Thing(tm)” as more people are going to invest in making the “Good Enough” work better despite its many failings instead of taking the lessons learned and readdressing the problem anew. Case in point – Apache. Case in point – tomcat. Case in point – Linux kernel.

Anyway – thanks for reading, and as you can see – I dont’ update my blog as often, so it doesn’t matter that you were a bit late. I want to make clear that I’m generally very happy with what Novell is doing for and with the open source community and with “desktop Linux” specifically – keep up the good work!