Nope.
It seems that for every "improvement" they can find, they figure out a way to make it worse.

Wait...wasn't it ATH0?

No, that's a wireless interface.

(ducks)

I'd say +1 on xTuple, but you've got far more insight than I.

I was about to suggest that myself; my brother demonstrated it recently at a smallish manufacturing company he works for. IIRC, they ended up going for the commercial version.

Clueless fellow who doesn't even understand what he's replying to.
The OP did not write it. He inherited it. VB was not his choice.
This isn't "How do I go rewrite this crap" but "I'm all for tossing every vestige of this out the door; does anyone have a replacement?"

And while we're at it:
SQL Express?
Go with Postgres or something else that scales in terms of systems rather than wallets.

+1 informative.
The iPad uses HTML5 video, though it's H264.

But that doesn't mean they are actual purchased iPads.

See here for a clue.

I haven't seen any behavior like that in Debian or Ubuntu, and suspect that PP is referring to the product rather than the means.

I expect that when PP refers to "egomaniac" he has Shuttleworth's comments about Canonical-developed software vs. other software (mostly RedHat, by chance) in mind.
As far as getting along with the maintainers goes, Ubuntu's certainly not bad.
But he doesn't agree with the decisions they make, so he thinks they suck.
[flamebait]
Frankly, I think that unity and gnome-shell are both misconcieved abominations, and KDE, Xfce, and Gnome 2 all seemed somewhat like shovelware.
IceWM is the best window manager, and who needs a desktop? They always end up getting loads of garbage thrown on them.
System init sucks in one way or another, all the time, though I'd rather use * + OpenRC or an LSB-conformant system atop sysvinit or kin than either upstart or systemd.
Those who get annoyed by Canonical working on Upstart have probably forgotten their history by now...
[/flamebait]
(It's good when it's fast, but it's important to be able to see how it works. No, "You can get the source if you want. You'ld better know C well." is not all there is to seeing how it works. Give me a script I can read.)

For "circlejerk committee..." I suspect he means either Debian or Gentoo. And I can't speak about Gentoo.
For Debian though, I'm more pleased with what the Debian developers come up with than with Red Hat.
Now that some of the old Debian developers have moved on and there are several contributors from Canonical, the average seems to be fairly tolerable.
You will really draw fire if you are persistent in disagreeing and not persuasive, or if you phrase things in a provocative way. Debian users and developers all seem to go by the rule "flaming where flaming is due," and are well able to dish it out. But it's quite possible to avoid that.

Now if he meant to refer to Arch, ....

I recall reading it in one of Groklaw's news picks, which as far as I can tell can't be searched.
So it'll be quite a while before I can find it, barring random luck.

Is that "different impression" an impression, or are there statements of fact that say otherwise?

That 2.25% is for quite a few patents; it is per major patent holder.
Garbage in, garbage out.

Background:
Microsoft asked Motorola how much they wanted for their standard-essential patents (which are covered by a FRAND commitment) on H264 and 802.11; Motorola quoted them 2.25% as an initial offer (for context, this is how much Microsoft charges for patents on Android devices). That worked out to $4 billion.
Rather than counter-offer or negotiate, Microsoft filed a lawsuit right away.
(While the lawsuit was in process, Google acquired Motorola. Some people are misrepresenting that bit.)
Outcome:
Microsoft got awarded $14.5 million, on the grounds that 2.25% was not reasonable.

Ahem.
Microsoft sued at least half a year before Google acquired Motorola.

And by the way: that $4 billion is 2.25%-which is the same rate that Microsoft charges.

That would be a problem... ...if $4 billion weren't an initial offer that MS never bothered making a counter offer on.

Motorola requested royalties up to $4 billion, sure.
But "demanded" does not reflect that this was their initial offer.
Standard practice for licensing is
1-owner offers to license for $x
2-potential licensee offers to pay $y
3-owner lowers price
4-potential licensee raises offer
5-haggle over what is covered and what it's worth
The impression given is that this was after step 5.
It actually was after step 1; Microsoft sued before they made a counter-offer.

Agreed.
egrep -F is the same as fgrep, and it uses fixed strings.
If he says "patterns", it's obviously egrep or grep, probably egrep -f.
egrep -f patterns -lr maildir is likely to be faster, because of startup costs.