Why There Won't Be a Windows 9
John Cook tells this wonderful story about Windows 10:
The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.
Many think this is stupid. They say that Microsoft should call the next version Windows 9, and if somebody’s dumb code breaks, it’s their own fault.
People who think that way aren’t billionaires.
Open source has generally been horrible about this type of thing, with the major exception of the Linux kernel, because Linus' attitude is very different:
> Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the > returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio. [redacted] It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand? Note the very different attitude of the glibc developers, who broke Flash Player for their users and said it was all Adobe's fault. Technically, yes, Adobe was abusing the system a bit, but it takes a special level of nerdiness to say "well, I will just break people's youtube because we are technically correct." (This is why we need managers: to tell geeks to cut that sort of shit out.)