"But politics shouldn't be a factor in software design. We should cooperate to work with the technologically most useful solution and not let personal or ideological differences get in the way."
That's one of the critics of open source (BSD) world versus free software world.
GNU/Linux projects have been designed for figthing on socio-ethico-political grounds against proprietary software. The first one being Unix. (GNU's Not Unix)
On the other hand, BSD prefers to see itself like a community of pragmatism, and creating values in business by sharing externalities (plus a bunch of fanatics that loves nice code like others ferarris).
The constant criticism of BSD vs linux is building tools for ideological reasons rarely favours the best solutions because you give yourself an obligation to beat the time to market of "proprietary companies" and to add support for stuff that do not worth being shared.(Word/WYSIWIG editors are a terrible idea in the first place, why spend resources to give them more traction by helping to broaden the user base?)
It favours kludges and hacks instead of a consistent simple design. It burns benevolent time, and attention.
And BSD have been denouncing GNU/linux projects (Gcc, gnome, systemd, binary blobs in linux kernels) like long term disasters by locking people in technical debts of poor designs.
Actually, I am a linux guy with BSD boxes and hadn't I problem with hardware support I would be fully on BSD.
I would say they have a point. And just for the record, GNU fundation is not Linus Torvald's best friends.
The first time I heard Moglen's talk he was litterally saying that linux was a bad example of a free software project.
Yes, freedom of choice is political. But it is not a question of organisation, but individuality.
Still some communities aims to gather more zealots than master in their domains. That is the distinction between Free Software and Open Source.
The reason the Linux community is so dysfunctional is because, for most people born during a certain time period, it's the first ever OS they use that isn't Windows, and the first ever Unix. Naturally this creates a lot of sudden revelations, and a lot of blowhards who think they're hot because they can rice their Arch Linux box. In the process a lot of false sense of technical prowess is generated.
Moreover, the network effects become so strong that at some point (which has already been crossed) Linux becomes the alternative OS, and from then on people feel like they can just ignore everyone else with impunity. They start to perceive themselves as the leaders, and everyone else must be biting their dust. Notice how Linux users often tend to be ignorant (and not only that, but resentful) of what BSD, Solaris, MINIX, Hurd and other folks are doing. Not the case with users of those other OSes, who as underdogs have more of a reason to cooperate and usually also have to study what the other is doing, especially so that Linux the big dog doesn't poorly reinvent some interface that ends up mutating across FOSS and leaving their access to portable software in the dust.
If through some historical accident 386BSD ended up making it unfettered from the trademark lawsuit fallout, it likely would have followed the same course. So would have the Hurd.
The AT&T lawsuits for the Unix (c) infringement has been largely used as a FUD from both MS and GNU against open source.
It was fixed fast, but the PR standed long. (calomniez, calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose)
The BSD community having been beaten early by the IP problems have been more cautious since this time whereas the linux (as an OS) community becoming an official UNIX (c)(tm) in 1997 as they became POSIX compliant and have been artificially protected from IP problems has been careless in disentangling itself from all the proprietary shit that IBM and other big company that wanted to kill the cost of maintaining their own OS have been putting in the OS. (the legal construct for protecting linux from patent/IP problems involves a lot of big companies and complex clauses).
POSIX may have follow IP protocol in the direction of bloatware specifications.
Linux without this compliance and the support of the big companies seeing it as a way to reduce their costs (RH/IBM/maya/Oracle) would not have been able to substitute itself to other proprietary UNIX in the realm of "professional IT". Especially because big vendors made a pax romana around linux concerning the claims of patents when contributing to the OS.
But by mimicking and being driven by normalization/fundations where the main stake holders are proprietary vendors (HW/SW...) linux has became something of a proprietary software itself.
(Just look at who are the main ISO/IETF/IEEE/POSIX contributors nowadays, and the member of OSI/linuxfundation.)
That also makes the assumption that there is only one "technologically most useful solution", when in practice every application has its own unique requirements, and trying to satisfy all of them just makes a system which is not particularly good at any one of them (systemd seems to be moving in that direction, not unlike other "enterprise" software.)
And that is why Unix as a concept has endured even in the face of opposition like Windows.
Because at its heart is a collection of tools that can be combined in whatever permutation that solves the task that the system user/admin has before him.
Possibly some backwards incompatible change was introduced & nobody feels like having to maintain version checking down to minor releases. systemd should learn how to run as a non-init service daemon
