Why is disabled status 2 instead of 0?

Question

A question for any magento devs:

Why is it that an enabled product has status 1, while a disabled product has a status of 2? Usually, "enabled" or "active" or whatever gets the status 1, while the converse is 0. Is there a reason why magento uses 2 here instead?

Answer 1

First of all the values shouldn't even be important.
Use in your code these constants Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Status::STATUS_ENABLED and Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Status::STATUS_DISABLED.
The reason I found so far is that when you want to create a product, in most cases you want it to be enabled. If the value for status disabled was 0, then this will be selected because the way that the current values are passed to the form through $form->setValues($data).
When creating a product $data is empty and, in the case of dropdowns, 0 = empty.
[EDIT]
I just remembered something else.
Initially the status had a separate table and there were 3 possible values.

insert  into {$this->getTable('catalog_product_status')}(`status_id`,`status_code`) values (1,'Enabled'),(2,'Disabled'),(3,'Out-of-stock');

And you could add more. check app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/sql/catalog_setup/mysql4-install-0.7.0.php.
This approach was dropped in mysql4-upgrade-0.7.4-0.7.5.php and I guess that for compatibility they kept the ids of the statuses.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS {$this->getTable('catalog_product_status')};

Answer 2

the product status value comes from the "status" select field from product management in admin. the "enabled" and "disabled" are the options of the select field with values 1 and 2. these are not boolean values.