On 11/12/12 15:37, Robin Björklin wrote: > Hi! > > First and foremost I'd like to present myself, I'm a young and naive junior > sys admin that think people should be able to compromise and see the bigger > picture and the good of the cause.
"compromise". That is almost always an evil word. In school in the United States, they taught us the "glories" of the art of compromise, and told us about the "wonderful compromises of our founding fathers" (mothers need not apply). If you look at them, with one major exception, which I would call a "nifty win-win solution" rather than a "compromise", most of them devalued people or kicked decisions down the road, clearly bad solutions that the wrong were glad to get and the right were willing to live with. By the logic of my teachers, if you wished to shoot me four times and I didn't wish to be shot at all, a good compromise would be to shoot me twice. How could either of us object? I have two fewer holes, you got to do some of what you wanted to do. yay. And of course, a compromised computer is a bad thing. You can accuse me of linguistic games, but I don't think the uses of "compromise" are as different as people like to pretend. Realistically, OpenBSD refuses to "compromise" on things it thinks are important. The small number of OpenBSD users like that; in fact, that's the reason we use OpenBSD. The lack of compromise results in high resistance to compromise. WE like it that way. > Now over to the reason for my post. > > As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these > days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. bingo. > What I'm wondering is why > the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux > community have decided to split their resources into several different > projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more > competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? That is an opinion. It may be right. As someone who has watched the Unix world since the 1980s, I disagree. It's been diverse for decades; in fact, it's been diverse since it escaped from the first computers it was developed on. That's been both a strength and a weakness of Unix. Lots of attempts to unify it have been made in the past, all failed. All involved committees and "compromise". And back to what you said earlier...yes, we couldn't care less. I suspect a number of OpenBSD developers would probably freak out if next year we were the #1 (or #3) OS in popularity...it would be a sign we are probably doing something terribly wrong. > Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest > BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and > create a Unified BSD? I wholeheartedly support your right to give it a shot and see what happens. Maybe you can break the Winux mindset. The BSD license begs you to take your dream and run with it. I hope you succeed, but only on my terms, of course. :) Your theory has been thought of many times before: http://xkcd.com/927/ (and many people reading this list know exactly what cartoon that is BEFORE clicking on it!) And realistically, that's to be expected. Why are there solutions A and B? Because some people prefer A, some prefer B. Try to make a "compromise" solution C, you will have people who STILL prefer A, others that STILL prefer B, and a few that think the compromise version is good. OpenBSD's goal has never been to be The Biggest or Most Successful. Just The Best, by the definition we chose. We don't see "the good of the cause" to compromise being the best (by our terms) for being the "biggest", or "bigger". Personally, I think there are bigger issues that the computer world needs to address, very high on my list is the level of craptastic design and implementation people tolerate and even encourage in the computer world. Why are your credit cards splattered all over the 'net? Well, I can say with confidence, compromise was involved -- between good design and an arbitrary deadline, between good design and pretty pictures, between good design by a skilled (and expensive) programmer and the $5/day that a programmer in Elbonia charged. Nick.
