Arrington is an arrogant bullying gasbag, so I don't care if he gets beat up in an interview. The rest of this piece is a lot more interesting: "This is mirror-tocracy not meritocracy." Absolutely true, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who pays attention.
Meh...As other commenters have noted, Dropbox is not for anyone who values their privacy. Your files are not secure from Dropbox staff snooping, and they'll fink you off to the flimsiest government request to paw through your stuff. I use Spideroak because they have true zero-knowledge encryption. Only the account holder has the encryption key, and they cannot get into your files. Of course this is sad for people who cannot track their passwords and always need the vendor to look out for them. And Pogue's entire workflow is goofy.
This is dumb. It's all about controlling your products that you own, and locking out the competition. Windows is a security disaster, and it doesn't matter how much duct tape and staples they load up on, it's still an insecure piece of junk.
I like the approach this piece takes, as it avoids the usual 'learn $foo_language 'cos it's hot!' approach. I hire people who genuinely love their chosen work and who love open source, and who really understand how it works. A good coder can learn any language-- I look for people who understand that any programming language is just a tool, a means to an end. They need to think and reason well, be resourceful, know how to learn, and be dependable. Most of all I look for people who place the end user first, which is something I wish the article had touched on. I also like that it mentions the myriad other disciplines that are part of any software project.