I like Unix. Not only do I regularly run Linux (a Unix clone) in a virtual machine, for years my firewall/internet services gateway ran the superlative FreeBSD (to finally be replaced by a solid state device running an embedded version of Linux). Unix-style command line utilities are a staple of my day to day computer use.

Nonetheless, many of the loudest people who associate themselves with Unix, Linux, or open-source in general are intolerable.

Case in point: http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2005/10/28/413255.aspx (read the comments, and the similar comments in the Slashdot discussion)

So Microsoft decided, for whatever reason (possibly just a changing shift in their development-group mindset), that symlinks are now a good choice, and this is the sort of response they get. This, sadly, is typical.

I've received this sort of feedback myself as well. For instance I received the following email in regards to an article I wrote for MSDN magazine (one about SVG graphics, in which I talked about the compressibility of SVGs via the specification's inclusion of GZIP - GZIP the standard, not gzip the product. GZIP, and the implementation gzip, is basically a wrapper around Lempel-Ziv compression, though strangely the critic didn't feel the need to acknowledge them)

"Thankfully, the SVG standard includes native support for GZIP compression (a standard documented in RFC 1952) . . ."

This is certainly correct, as far as it goes. However, you neglected to mention that "gzip" is one of a number of GNU utilities, the main branch of Open Source development. The authors of "gzip" are Jean-loup Gailly <JLOUP@GZIP.ORG>, and Mark Adler.

While not strictly necessary, it would have been nice to mention that "gzip" came from outside the MS Windows world. It is somewhat disturbing that Windows developers, and in at least one instance, Microsoft itself, use Open Source code without crediting the source.

This was in response to an article I wrote advocating the open W3C scalable vector graphics format, providing all source code with BSD licensing, and including more links and references to open source projects than you're normally going to find in an MSDN article.

Nonetheless, I was the "enemy" to this guy.