Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.

So I decided that if the architecture is fundamentally sane enough, say it follows some basic rules like it supported paging , then I would be able to say, yes, Linux fundamentally supports that model.

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works but only want to use it is not only a tribute to how good Linux is, but it also brings up issues that I would never have thought of otherwise.

I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.

To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.

Programmers are in the enviable position of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like that, but not that many.