In the past week or two, I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to wrangle the configuration of my two Linux boxes, getting them to be good, cooperative members of my home email and file backup network. Nothing about configuring Linux is straightforward — something that goes fifteenfold for servers when compared to desktops — so that’s why I’m less amused by Eric Raymond’s rant about open source usability problems than I am by John Gruber’s note about the irony of Eric Raymond’s rant. The fact that one of the largest proponents of the open source movement, and someone who has quite a bit of technical and systems administration skill, dropped 3,500 words on the horrors of open source usability should raise a few eyebrows (but, of course, it won’t).