[advocacy-discuss] The Linux Crusade: A Prelude

[Kristian Rink]

Qingye Jiang (John) schrieb:
> When was the last time the Linux folks became so aggressive, launching
> warfares against other members in the open source movement, and brothers
> and sisters in the Linux ecosystem as well?
>   
Though I understand the general issue: Why bother? Haven't things like
this been around for half an eternity, eventually starting with
"vim-vs.-emacs", makings its way to "KDE-vs.-GNOME", now eventually
ending in "Linux-vs.-OpenSolaris"? I think there are way too many
reasons involved for certain people (not) liking certain platforms,
vendors, developers, whatever. There's always people spreading FUD no
matter whether willingly or accidentially, and there's always people
taking it for granted. Maybe one part of it should be teaching people to
make up their mind and, regardless of FUD, choose what feels appropriate
to them, no matter whether talking about technical or political or
ethical reasoning. OpenBSD people won't care less about any rants out of
the Linux crowd (then and now OpenBSD used to be a small yet reliable
platform), Linux supporters then and now hardly cared about any
Microsoft FUD and surely showed some people this way, and I think
talking about OpenSolaris we shouldn't really bother taking these things
too seriously. After all, we know what is good about OpenSolaris, we
know what keeps _us_ interested in this platform and why we are
eventually using it, and we know despite there are some developers /
users making questionable statements, they hardly could speak for their
community as a whole (consider the Torvalds-vs.-GPLv3 debate dividing
the Linux community itself to some degree...). Shouldn't we get back to
using, working with and on OpenSolaris, "spreading the word" and showing
people that there is an other option (no matter whether better or worse)
next to Linux, FreeBSD and whatever? This would help a lot more I guess. ;)

Just my $0.02 of course...
Kristian