QUOTE: Windows never mucks up, slow down, to a point where only a reinstall will do.
As you sarcastically imply, MS Windows does tend to have more problems than most Linux distributions (though it seems like the last few years have seen development of various Linux distributions trying to reach parity with MS Windows problems). I don't think that's a good reason to pretend it's not ridiculous that getting a bunch of multimedia stuff working to a minimal level of general usability is not a generally solved problem for open source OSes, yet.
People seem to just refuse to reuse each others' work. It seems like every distribution has a different kludgey mess of stuff as its solution to multimedia support, every two years sees a drastic shakeup in the basic architecture of multimedia related subsystems for a lot of Linux distributions, and every OS project has an approach to working around the patent problem all its own rather than people working together.
Part of this can be attributed to license incompatibilities, of course. For instance, anything CDDLed or OpenSSL Licensed is at least claimed by the FSF to be incompatible with the GPL, in the former case because no two copyleft licenses are compatible in principle and in the latter because the FSF would rather break software than offer a license that allows combination with works licensed under terms including something like an advertising clause. (I don't like advertising clauses, either -- for basically the same reasons that licenses with advertising clauses go on the Copyfree Initiative's rejected licenses list -- but that doesn't mean I want my license to explicitly forbid people from combining my code with code that comes with an advertising clause in its license.)
The licensing woes of communities surrounding software licensed under various GNU terms, however, do not seem sufficient to explain the full extent of the invasion of Not Invented Here syndrome amongst developers of Linux-related software.
I'm not one of those guys who thinks there should only be one or two Linux distributions, or that there shouldn't be competing software offerings even amongst subsystems for Linux-based systems, for purposes of making things less "confusing". I think competition is healthy, and helps drive innovation. My problem with all this is not competition: it's anticompetition, in the form of intentional incompatibility and other roadblocks to getting people to rely on the work of others. People would rather be the One True Something, so they create something completely new and make fun of others' work that came before rather than learn from it; they do almost nothing at all to ensure that different options can be used as drop-in replacements for each other; they refuse to help each other use their code, trying to at the same time enforce some skewed variety of "openness" and keep others from using their code.
It's depressing.
relevant links:
http://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html (OpenSSL License and GPL compatibility)
http://copyfree.org/rejected/ (Copyfree Initiative list of rejected licenses)
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/not-invented-here-has-no-place-in-open-source-development/460 ("Not Invented Here" Has No Place In Open Source Development)
