If you're gonna go back to that era, someone needs to mention the great shareware FTP archives of the pre-Web internet: wustl.edu, garbo.uwasa.fi, simpnet (? it's been too long).

Am I the only one who kept checking the READMEs for new pointers by the maintainers? I probably downloaded way too many games on the recommendation of obscure Finnish professors :-)

More like a 3rd of that, unless you assume that every man, woman and child regardless of age, owns and operates a PC.

Desktop Linux a marginal market niche of enthusiasts who will continue to consume it regardless of competitive advantage (i.e. either because of politics or because they need a commodity Unix-like OS on their desktops). That means that as a commercial alternative Linux is dead, unless your target market is that same enthusiast market --after all people still sell software for the Amiga.

The larger question that I don't see debated anywhere is: is for-profit open-source software development dead? Exclude the service providers (like RedHat) and 1-2 politically motivated success stories (Firefox; more of an ad service than a software vendor anyway), and who are the software vendors who are making money off of open source?

They explicitly states that they looked at Twisted and chose to write something more user-friendly. Having looked at Twisted (3-4 years ago though) and at Tornado's samples and benchmarks I think they succeeded. Twisted seems to be going the way of Zope: an interesting platform that did everything its own way and shut itself out from the rest of the Python universe, eventually losing relevancy.

I think a Tornado/Django mashup (Tornado infrastructure, Django front-end/application bootstrapping) would be realllly interesting....

Your setup sounds very interesting and close to what I've been looking for for ages. Is that something you setup yourself? are there services out there that will set something like that up for a small business? links or pointers?

The whitespace issue is a red-herring: most people get used to it quickly and it's not as strict as it sounds (you can mix-and-match tabs and spaces, as long as you are consistent for each *block*; not even an entire .py file). There's two real-world problems with it: copy-and-paste and generating Python code. Both are much less common than looking at badly-formatted code that it takes a bit to mentally parse which brace-delineated languages have.