[krick]

> Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was

Oh, it has been a long time since 1992 and these posts by Tannenbaum are pretty famous (actually, I'm surprised it still appears on HN). So we did laugh already. Later we suddenly stopped laughing and it was more like your "second approach". But that also was quite a while ago. Next wave of philosophical though in techno society was reflecting on all these "worse in better" stuff, "MIT vs Berkley", "Lisp is older that C", "ML is 40 years old". Because, really, it's all about the same idea. And posts about "Cathedral and bazaar" and how dot com bubble destroyed the notion of sound architecture is pretty much about the same thing.

So for me it isn't anymore about any new "lessons" to learn from that. Just a painful reminder on "sooner or later we'll have to throw all these tremendous work away and start anew… shall we?".