This Isn't a Battle

Last night, I read a blog post with great interest.

As is often the case, I found points where I agreed (at least partially) with the author, and others where I completely disagreed. And that’s perfectly fine.

There was one point, however, where my disagreement was total. I'll quote a part of the article here: “The FreeBSD community is...difficult. What I mean by this is that it feels much like the average Linux community in the early 2000s: it looks down on others (in this case Linux users), it appears rather unwelcoming and at times downright toxic. Any time you mention anything vaguely related to Linux you'll inevitably cause somebody to go on a massive rant about how FreeBSD is better than Linux.

It also seems there's a general dislike for change, even if said change is for the better. It feels like a form of "tech boomerism": change is bad because it's not what we're used to, even if the end result is in fact better.”

Frankly, my own experience has been the complete opposite. The communities around the BSD systems are open, friendly, and extremely approachable - though, of course, everyone has their own personality, and toxic people can exist within these communities as well. When I started becoming more active in the BSD community, I received a completely unexpected welcome. The BSD conferences I've attended have the atmosphere of a family, of close friends. No one shows up to boast, but to discuss, to dialogue. In a word: to build.

But I picked up on two details from the excerpt: “mention anything vaguely related to Linux” and “tech boomerism: change is bad because it’s not what we’re used to, even if the end result is in fact better”. This suggested something to me that was later confirmed when the author mentioned the “three firewalls competing with each other” within FreeBSD.

They don’t compete with each other. They coexist - and that’s a completely different thing. This gave me the key to understanding the previous part as well.

This isn't a battle. We aren't in a ruthless commercial arena where different solutions copy each other to get ahead, hoping to attract "users" (better: paying customers) from the other side. And unfortunately, this is something that has been happening in many "mainstream" Open Source communities for a while now. It's a loss of the Open Source philosophy - of doing something for the pleasure of it, to have something different, and to be open to contributions from others, as well as the idea of making what you create public and free. Whether it's with licenses like the GPL or like BSD, MIT, etc., the spirit is to say: “Here it is. If it’s useful to you, take it. If you want, contribute. Otherwise, you can move on; you have no constraints or obligations.”

I often see curious Linux users arriving in BSD communities, and that’s fantastic. The spirit is almost always positive, exploratory: “What can the BSDs do for me?” And sometimes, that turns into, “What can I do for the BSDs?”

But this isn't a religion - you don't need to choose one - and you can use different OSes based on your needs. I happily use Linux, in its various distributions, for some of my workloads. I'm writing this post on a mini PC running openSUSE Tumbleweed, on btrfs, and it works wonderfully. No BSD, at the moment, has adequate support for this machine. I use Linux, and I'm happy with it.

The purpose of the BSDs, like other Open Source operating systems less adopted than Linux and its distributions, isn't to "win" or to "emulate" but to be themselves. So, arriving in a BSD community and saying "but on Linux..." as if it were an example to be followed, has, over time, become an attitude that is not well-tolerated.

BSD communities value stability - and these communities are much, much smaller than those around projects like Linux and its distributions. It's therefore inevitable that some things will lag behind or that they won't want to embark on projects that might leave something unfinished and malfunctioning. Unfortunately, this sometimes happens anyway. It's better not to seek it out deliberately.

Desktop use for the BSDs has never been a primary focus, particularly for FreeBSD and NetBSD. To judge them on this metric alone is, therefore, extremely limiting and, in a sense, unfair.

So, coming back to the article I read - I understand some of the author's points of view, but calling the FreeBSD community a form of tech "boomers" or "toxic" because it doesn't want to follow Linux's example is, in my opinion, a flawed approach to an autonomous, different operating system.

Let's try to shake off the aggressive, competitive, and monopolistic dynamics when we approach the Open Source world. The plurality of completely autonomous choices is a richness for everyone. Monoculture is always harmful and, in the long run, destructive.

It reminds me of the time when all smartphone manufacturers were trying to copy the iPhone as much as possible. All the phones were the same: either originals or copies, but all extremely similar. How boring.