The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.

So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside.

It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.

The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.

I'm a big non-believer in manual driver and kernel configuration, be it visual or not.