I've yet to see a single focused Open Source project even approach products such as VMWare. [...] What quality products has OSS rapidly developed?
Okay, troll, I'll bite.
The GNU tools, such as the file utilities, grep, sed, and so on, have long been better than the tools supplied with most vendors' Unices. Tests show that they simply work better. (In fact, those particular tests, in which various vendors' utilities crashed when fed random input, have been mentioned before on Slashdot.)
I now consider Linux to be better than proprietary Unix simply because it comes with the GNU tools. For example, we recently acquired a Sun box which was essentially unusable until we wasted a large amount of time replacing many of the utilities with their GNU equivalents.
Why can't the following be done: have a standardized superset of flags for the most common and widespread options, such as verbose (-v), version (-V), recursive (-r), all (-a), force (-f).
The GNU Project does define such a set of standard options for long options such as --verbose, --version, etc. Of course, there's no hope of completely standardising the wild array of differing interpretations of short options. As others have said: that's fine; trying to do it would constraint lots of utilities, annoy lots of people, and take away some of the fun!:-)
[Someone else:]
Even better was the approach the Amiga took. It had standardised on a single library to parse all command lines, and allowed you to always know how to get at least the list of arguments to a particular command.
GNU short and long options are always (by sane programmers anyway!) parsed using the getopt_long library routine. Potentially one day someone will get around to integrating this with readline in some way to get option completion and lists of arguments and all the good stuff the dear old Amiga had.
Slashdot Mirror
The GNU tools, such as the file utilities, grep, sed, and so on, have long been better than the tools supplied with most vendors' Unices. Tests show that they simply work better. (In fact, those particular tests, in which various vendors' utilities crashed when fed random input, have been mentioned before on Slashdot.)
I now consider Linux to be better than proprietary Unix simply because it comes with the GNU tools. For example, we recently acquired a Sun box which was essentially unusable until we wasted a large amount of time replacing many of the utilities with their GNU equivalents.
Borgificatio n continues as usual . You will be assimilated.