Some comments have said: it's a silly bug, but the condition is still true so WTF? I would like to think that it was finally closed at least partially because i

Some comments have said: it's a silly bug, but the condition is still true so WTF? I would like to think that it was finally closed at least partially because it was a silly bug and this is an acknowledgement of its silliness, and the degree to which it become ever more silly over the years. It would've been well-intentioned but probably misguided if it existed in 1997. It was mildly silly in 2004, but monumentally silly in 2013. In the Linux community (or politics, or business, or professional sports, or entertainment gossip, or any number of other things that people follow), people have a natural tendency to create ongoing dramatic narratives about what's going on in whatever thing it is that they're following. These narratives (certainly the Linux and sports and politics ones) always involve divvying up the participants into goodguys and badguys and us and them, in the most reductive and intellectually dishonest way possible. But, I guess it makes everything fun and exciting, and for people who don't actually know (or want to know?) how complicated and unknowable everything is, it gives them a sense of belonging and makes them feel like they understand what's really going on in the world. Rush Limbaugh has often said things like, "I take things that are complicated and make them simple. I figure all of this stuff out so you don't have to." That tells you pretty much all you need to know about him, and the people he appeals to. I'm not picking on the right, I could throw any number of demagogues on the left into the same category. Anyway, unsurprisingly, the simplified narratives that these people always present are all about how everything's black and white and how this one group of people have all the answers. They could make everything better if only this other group of people, who are chock full of evil and malice towards you, would let them. In politics, this kind of reductionist tribalism is actually really messed up, because it influences the government in real ways. Among sports fans, being a reductionist tribal idiot is not that big of a deal, because it's all in good fun and the worst case scenario is you might have to stumble across some guy's stupid rant about how the Raiders are the root of all evil and the people of Oakland are actually bad human beings by mere association. In the Linux community...I don't know. If you think of it as a fun hobby for a bunch of CS students, engaging in a little reductionist tribal idiocy is possibly amusing, possibly annoying, but pretty harmless. However, at some point as a project becomes larger and more meaningful to more people, I think it actually gets in the way of the community's ability to cohere around truly meaningful goals and ideals. It needs to grow up, basically, and it doesn't need to engage in dumb demagoguery to move forward- it's reached a point where dumb demagoguery may actually hold it back. In 2013, fear and loathing with regard to MS is a pointless distraction. Brain cells devoted to hand-wringing about some imagined Evil Empire are brain cells not spent creating cool and useful things.