The Drunken Canaries?

Okay, so the is still rampant, and this time it isn't John Dvorak teasing users in a sleazy way.

No, ladies and gentlemen, make way for a link magnet (via Gruber), written by someone who is surely attempting to emulate Dvorak's merciless goading by leveraging the - and, as usual, completely missing the point.

The whole thing would be commonplace and humdrum if it weren't written by Tim O'Reilly, who really ought to know better.

Not only does his piece conveniently fail to mention the reasons for Mark's switch, its substance boils down to being a Technorati magnet to plug the upcoming "Ubuntu Hacks" book (which I'm not linking to on purpose) among a mismash of name-dropping and spurious statistics.

The stats are probably worth someone's effort in debunking by themselves - they are taken from O'Reilly's own hand-picked sources, and their inner workings are supposedly in a PDF conveniently stashed away (and available only to IEEE members), so you either take the graphs at face value (which is clearly why they were inserted in that piece) or have no way whatsoever to validate them.

Shame on you, Tim - I never expected you to go for the "disinformation pushes sales" angle, and the little "we're just stirring the pot" joke is, quite frankly, beneath you.

This page is referenced in: