To be a bit more generous: I think from Scott Chacon's point of view, "They had no taste and we beat them in the market" is a fair way to hold the elephant. Lacking the Google-internal perspective, it's a reasonable conclusion from the signal he has. I don't get the sense from this post that he's trying to publish a doctoral thesis on the historical situation in the industry; he's providing some primary-source testimony from his point of view.
He's not just providing primary source testimony from his point of view, he's trying to pretend he has primary source testmony on what others were doing as well.
If he left out the parts where he has no data (or said i don't know), it would have IMHO been a better post, and actually primary source testimony.
You also don't run into the Gell-Mann amnesia problem this way.
