There is a lot to agree on here. Thank you for the podcast! I certainly agree that the distro-obsessiveness is absurd, and there should be more of a focus on applications. And there is so much overlap and duplicated effort in every area of software in the Open Source world.

I tend to think that Microsoft's recent dalliance with "openness" is just a case of Embrace, Extend, Exterminate. Essentially, an attempt to get Computer Science students and Programmers to think of the Command Line, and Linux as an esoteric extension of Windows. But who knows what they are thinking.