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Wow, aren't we smug? Maybe you might learn something if you paid attention instead of contriving haughty comebacks to "you people".
Red Hat is modifying the kernel, don't read the headlines? Although it won't effect the userland, try apply many existing patches against the existing Red hat source code. There will be problems.
Wow, big fucking deal. Your patches might not apply against a particular vendor's private source tree. Why is this an issue for Linux application programmers again?
There are many X11 implementations and they are very much compatible, though some are at different levels of specification advancement.
We'll have to wait and see.
Wait and see? X11 has been around for, oh I don't know, 15 years now? How much longer do you have to wait to be convinced that designing an open, extensible spec from the beginning is a recipe for interoperability and compatibility, whether you like open source or prefer your software nice and closed.
It's fragmentation. There's no reason why KDE couldn't have used GTK. But they didn't, and now programs are less portable.
No reason? How about the fact that GTK+ was pretty much unusable in 1998? How about the fact that KDE developers typically prefer a native C++ GUI library? Is there no room for individual choice or competition in the world of software development? Do you really think GTK+ would be as advanced as it is today if it hadn't been for the hundreds of people hacking on it who were sneering at Qt and saying "We can do it better"?

Only recently have these toolkits even approached a decent level of functionality. To coincide with that, interoperability standards began to be published on freedesktop.org. If KDE or GNOME does not conform to those standards, it is considered a bug. How much more can you ask for? Tell me you prefer Motif or something, since you seem to be sucking Sun's cock so cheerfully.

You admit it's fragmentation, good. You're learning.
You really do resent people having choices in this world, don't you? GNU is free to implement whatever extensions they want. They also provide -ansi and -std=? to ensure that if you want no part of those extensions, none will slip by. GCC for years had things that the C99 standard just showed up with, such as inline functions, variadic macros, etc etc. What's better, an extension that can be disabled at the programmer's option to avoid straying from the standards, or nothing at all?
Then you're a fool. There are millions of reasons why Java will fragment if it goes open source. The C standards are solid standards, but GNU made extensions anyway. Open source developers do what they want, standards or not.
Out of millions of reasons, you haven't bothered to list one. Look at Mono. Is it "fragmenting"? Why would anyone bother? Sun's Java distribution would be the reference Java distribution of the entire free software world. Far from encouraging forking and incompatibility, I think developers would leave the various incomplete Java projects behind and work on the one true Java. You're welcome to your opinion, but you have provided absolutely no prior occurrences to back up your baseless assertions that Open implies Forking and that Forking implies Incompatibility.
Open source zealots would choose an open version over Suns clean-room version. It's what you people do. Sooner or later, the Sun version isn't mainstream.
Please, a little more vitriol in your sneering. Have you ever considered that Sun might want to wash its hands of being the primary supporter of Java? You don't know one way or the other, so making sarcastic comments about what might happen is pointless.

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