When I was at BYU in the late 90s, it was stated by several professors that CS was the most enrolled in and dropped out of major, so I agree that an increase in enrollment doesn't mean a whole lot. The meaningful number will be to see if there's a corresponding increase in the degrees awarded rate in 4 years.

The discussed email from ESR states that git has won the mindshare war and that Mercurial is "is not looking real healthy these days". So while I agree with everything you said, it appears that the general opinion does not.

Yes, when all the choices are bad that may be true, but competition is always a HUGE motivator. Take the recent events with gcc. It had been poking along before and then along came Clang/LLVM and now gcc has made imense strides.

That's nice in theory and usually true in practice, but not universally true. While not explicitly the same issue, this bug ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eclipse/+bug/997461 ) highlights how even a large company like Google doesn't put in the effort to deal the sporatic shifts.

Code written for Android can't be run on another platform without rewriting large portions of the code. In essence, it's basically just the same sort of additions that Microsoft did and got tons of bad press about.

The issue is that you can't take a phone into some areas, like into a test, and that's where a product like this comes into play.

Except for the fact that Apple has also stood in the way of the adoption of Ogg Theora as a standard for the video tag, so they're doing just as much to prevent the dismissal of flash as they are usher it in (or you could be even more tinfoil hatish and say that they're just trying to replace one proprietary standard with another).

The massive series of apps and developer support that's growing around Android will probably push Maemo out of the market.

Then give it a try: http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/