On projects and their goals

however, you need to be very careful in what you say.

If it's true it needs to be said (but keep in mind that it may not be true after the next release of the competition)

Exposing weaknesses is good, even for the project who's weaknesses are being exposed. It gives the developers of that project a chance to either plan to fix the weakness, or to clarify their vision and say that they think other things are more important.

People do need to accept that a project may decide not to do something that you want, or to do something that you don't want. You can try to persuade them, you can fork the project, or you can move to another project, but you don't have the right to harass them about that decision forever (see the KDE4.0 release and the fact that people two years later are still picking on it as an example of what not to do). The Ubuntu issue falls in this category.

However, if you make claims about your competition that are not true, you should expect to be called on them.

For example, you can't make a statement about databases and say that MySQL doesn't have transactions and not expect to have a few dozen people correct you. You can state that the most common back-end doesn't have transactions. On the other side the MySQL people can't get away with making performance claims based on the transaction free back-end and capability claims based on the transaction-capable back-end (unless they make very clear that you don't get both from the same back-end) they will have many people call them on this.

The community has always responded rapidly to incorrect information. With the amount of FUD thrown our way from the outside, the responses have gotten faster and stronger. This is a good thing when the people making the false statements are companies like SCO, it's not as good when it's something like the Subversion vision statement. However I don't think that you can get one without the other.