mikehearn: Really, really excellent post, topping a series of excellent posts. The discussion of COM and object models has been one the most interesting topics here at advogato in recent weeks. Just a point about KDE hostility to object model standardisation on a GTK standard: I think we are starting to put behind us the days of religious conflict between the Gnome and KDE camps. Making GObject palatable to the KDE project means finding practical reasons that it is worth KDE developer's time to embrace it. It's harder to make that case when you already have an object model you are happy with.

Murphy, Prince of Darkness There's a paper by Wietse Venema outlining four important and misunderstood kinds of security risk, that I recently rediscovered, entitled Murphy's law and computer security. This is a nice, well-illustrated paper that I strongly recommed.