Best of the Web: Everyone's a Thief & OpenDoc OSR

Everyone is a Thief (A Different Approach to skills) by Daimon Games has an interesting idea in which everyone has thief skills at their level. So a 4th level fighter also has 4th level thief skills. Brilliant in its simplicity and it gets rid of thieves as a class.

Nine and Thirty Kingdoms had a trioof posts (B/X is Bad, Mmmkay? Part 1, B/X is Bad, Mmmkay? Part II, and B/X Is Bad: Summary and Conclusion) explaining why he doesn't like the B/X system.

Axes and Orcs has a post BX is adequately good enough supporting all OSR games, they are DIY after all so house rule away your problems. There are no links on Axes and orcs post so I can't tell if he is responding to one or more of the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms posts or not but the timing and specificity of BX suggests he is (I'm not going to twitter to find out).

Anyway I'm not picking sides, opinions are opinions and even negative opinions are useful (I always disagreed with Roger Ebert's movie reviews but could tell by his review if I'd like a movie or not, he hated a lot of the movies I loved as a kid). No, Axes and Orcs position has me thinking of the OSR as a whole. I've seen polls and charts of which games are the most popular but none indicating how much each is house ruled and which bits are frequently house ruled. Do folks regularly house rule 50%? 5%? of their game and do they house rule Classes, spells, ENC and Initiative or is it all over the place?

Back in the 90s Apple, IBM, and Motorola created OpenDoc as an alternate to Microsoft Office. From wikipedia:

The core idea of OpenDoc is to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing, or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provides a framework in which these components can run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component. 

OpenDoc failed but it seems as if that's what is going on in the OSR with house-ruling, and nobody actually planned it that way, it just sort of grew organically which is kind of cool. I suspect the next step would be to determine which rules are often house-ruled and have games break out those bits & pieces (probably in the SRD if one is available) to make them easier to mix and match.