Labeling Joel as "no more than a trolling windows programmer" is an over-generalisation. As you know, we humans need to make generalisations in order to survive. For example, Newton's Laws of Motion are generalisations, and so is the Law of Gravitation. We can also make a generalisation that in the United States, secular Jews are more successful than Negros. It is true that there are Black billionaires, and some lower middle-class Jews, but it is still true as a generalisation.

However, over-generalisations and labeling are a Logical fallacy and a Cognitive Error, which should be avoided.

Joel is a human. Human beings are not perfect. Everybody have their high points and low points. I generally found a lot of value and amusement in what Joel said. However, I did find some of his articles annoying or badly written. I'm not a Joel groupie and don't think he's perfect, and can point to several things with which I disagree.

From my impression (a generalisation) Joel has some lulls, but then he's back. He had a lull a bit before Camels and Rubber Duckies (which, IMHO is his funniest article yet), and he had a lull when this post by you was written, but also eventually got his act together.

I should note that I am susceptible to FUD, prejudice, hearsay, false impressions and so on as well. However, I'm trying to grow and become a better person, rather than a more prejudiced one. And as people say, a wise man can learn from a fool, much more than a fool can learn from a wise man.

Joel may have a slightly different perspective than most FOSS developers, but I found that a lot of what he says makes sense, and has proven useful in my day to day work, and has made me more efficient. For the record, I have been labeled as well several times: as the Perl Black Sheep ("Shlomi Fish is... always wrong"), as someone who talks a lot and writes no code, as an "idiot", etc. However, these labels are, while being ingrained in some Truth, do not represent the fully inteligent, talented and capable me. Neither does your label represents Joel, who is a human being, not a label.

From my impression (another generalisation), FOSS programmers who dislike Joel tend to be a bit too closed-minded about things. They don't realise that FOSS is not always the best option, that some proprietary software is actually pretty good or very good, and that we can often learn from each other. I, while releasing all of my public code (and most other text and other media) as open-source, still would not recommend Oracle.com to release the Oracle database as open source software, for example.