To get up to speed with what I’m talking about, read Gruber’s “Avie Tevanian Leaving Apple” item.

[W]ithout question, Tevanian has been hugely influential in the development and design of Mac OS X.

The best post I’ve seen on the topic is this one from, err, “Mark- Card Carrying FanaticRealist” (what?):

Just so I’m clear!
MSFT can’t deliver an operating system in six years and none of the senior management fsckwits responsible have either jumped or been pushed, despite the fact that the stock price has been stagnant for the best part of five years.
Avie Tevanian’s team delivers 1 major OS platform and five significant revisions, plus God only knows how many patches, and he decides to leave and commune with nature or whatever rather than stick around to earn more stock options which will undoubtedly appreciate because of Apple’s continuing commercial improvement.
If that isn’t an example of the cosmic joke that is the Universe, I’d like to know what is!

We will conveniently leave out economics of scale in this calculation; also, some of the assertions aren’t quite accurate. But the point still stands: isn’t it ironic?

It’s all a matter of accountability.