On 2/16/2011 2:28 AM, Steve Shockley wrote: > Status quo, then? Of course. I obviously didn't expect anything to be changed through this half-humorous / half-serious conversation, except to better measure and document the political and cultural attitude within this project. If as the result of this even one person has spent even one minute logically analyzing the wisdom of clinging on to the Berkeley legacy indefinitely, then this whole exercise has been worth it.
To review, the "status quo" is: * OpenBSD currently remains the best choice for people who care about attaining as much Copyfree license purity as we possibly can, but FreeBSD looks to surpass it by getting rid of GCC and other GNU entanglements, which are an even bigger issue than kernel BLOB's. * OpenBSD currently remains an OK bare-hardware server OS, especially if you can offload certain performance-sensitive tasks to something else, but it continues to fall further behind as many companies pump billions of R&D dollars into next-gen security innovations, including "managed code" OS'es, that will eventually make BSD's accomplishments technically obsolete. Whether you like it or not, OpenBSD's greatest long-term legacy may have more to do with FLOSS licensing politics rather than security and design. * BSD's unrepentant legacy of violence (government funding) and other socialist cultural leanings continue to leave a bad taste in many a libertarian's month, but historical "karma" is ultimately far less crucial than licensing terms, so we will continue to use it. An ever- growing fraction of the Copyfree software stack is coming from non- governmental sources like Google, Apple, Apache, Haiku, etc. It's a tedious distinction, but nonetheless a relevant one, and libertarians should give priority to projects that reflect their values. Any significant Copyfree OS (even a *BSD fork) to take this seriously is getting a big fat check, and not only from me. * The "I Got Flamed By Theo de Raadt" t-shirts will continue to sell very well. (And I didn't even have to betray any technical ignorance to earn that distinction - my C skills have been rotting since the days of MS-DOS, tee hee hee.) Our fun little game of trying to research and deduct the exact political and philosophical leanings of various BSD VIP's will go on indefinitely. * This advocacy@ mailing list will probably remain ~95% off-topic spam, but I doubt any of it will ever provoke as much anger as I did (ex. several profanity-filled private e-mails). Those people need to examine the root causes of their anger... It seems that a lot of FLOSS programmers are disproportionately jumpy these days - that's obviously too narrow an observation to lead to any conclusions, but could it be that their love for "egoboo" is not being adequately requited? A lot of FLOSS programmers are coming to re-examine their values in these tough economic times, and this can lead them in several possible directions, from a more business-friendly outlook to a belief that more "free software" should be funded by the state. This "elephant in the room" cannot be ignored forever. "You can't be neutral on a moving train."
