Doubt that the ideological purity of OpenBSD has ever been an objective in
the larger political sense. OpenBSD has a different kind of purity that
it strives for. Left, right, mainstream, libertarian, socialist,
anarchist, communist, or government spy, so long as you keep your politics
out of the code, and write it clean and brilliant, that's all we ask.
More power to the libertarians if they can do the best job using the tool
that results. Personally I hope they can, but they have their work cut
out for them, same as anyone else.
Also, as an international project, few here give a damn about overly
narrow US centric political pigeon holes of which libertarianism is
certainly one.
Austin
On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, Alex Libman wrote:
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."
