The fundamental flaw in CatB is that it was essentially an adaptation of ESR's libertarian creed, that Free Market is infallible and would always boil down to the best optimal solution. While that may work on the scale of a single project, it fails when applied to a full ecosystem, and thus we get dozens of competing projects aiming at the solving the same problems (WMs, desktops...).

It also postulated that code being open would incite devs to be as their technical best, in order to gain peer respect. That didn't happen either, quite the contrary the OSS community has proved to be rather conservative and traditional, Unix being seen as "The Right Way", not to be deviated from.

In short, the Bazaar model completely failed in its promise to always let the best solution win. What we got instead was perpetual chaos, and less than 1% of the desktop share.

I attended the 1st GUADEC back in 2000. If at that time we had known where we'd actually be 12 years later, we'd all have left in disgust.

I moved to OS X in 2008, my only regret was not doing it any sooner.