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Zawinski is a nihilist crybaby who thinks anything he didn't create is garbage. He can be amusing for a while, but then his whining gets tiresome. While he did participate in the founding of Mozilla, he abandoned it when things didn't go to suit him (i.e. it actually became open source).

Let me understand you. What part of Zawinski's statement is false? Nothing you've said contradicts his statement.

His statement is pointless, and that's the...er...point.

As you belabored everyone to point out in your previous post (more on that in a moment), no software is effort-free. Also, it misses the point of open source (as, I suspect, have you). The point of open source software is not to produce something with no cost and, therefore, no value. The point of open source is to allow widespread use that results in widespread improvement without the roadblocks of proprietary development. Finally, the other point, which I made and you missed, is that Zawinski's well-known attitude toward Linux is hypocritical. By his own admission, the denigrating comments he made were anachronistic since he made them after a single exposure to Linux in the very early days of its existence.

Keep in mind that Zawinski is no fan of Microsoft. He named them the "Evil Empire" and expended considerably more energy in ripping them to shreds in public and on the web than he has Linux.

In short, his comment was flippant and content-free and made solely for effect.

As for your discussion on my responses to McVoy, you need to re-read what he said. What part of "you are giving customers crap" did you fail to understand? His remarks cannot be parsed to mean anything other than that he believes the service model (one of several models, by the way) of open source amounts to little more than extortion. He (and you, apparently) fail to understand that there are a number of open source business models, some more successful than others, but all workable nonetheless. McVoy is just wetting his pants in public because he and Linus are feuding. Of course that always brings out the vultures who seem to delight in heralding any bump in the open source road as the beginning of the end. Why there are so many of you out there who are so threatened by open source, I guess I'll never know.