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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, when the Linux phenomenon was new, they used to make just as bad (or even worse) jokes at Windows’ expense. But they don’t anymore. Why is that? Maybe they gained enough acceptance that they don’t feel they have to, anymore. In that case, the fact that FreeBSD still does this is a symptom that FreeBSD does not view itself as having gained common acceptance.

EDIT: Toned down possibly inflammatory language

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Have you ever read some comment sections on Phoronix and /r/linux (or even LWN) when BSD is brought up? The lighthearted licensing jabs we see here are nothing compared to the vitriolic disinformation that is regularly seen when uninformed Linux users try to talk about other operating systems.

This is an infamous example: http://lwn.net/Articles/430598/ [gets particularly heated at mezcalero's top level comment]

Linux users make jokes at Windows' expense all the time. It's usually not higher profile developers doing it, but nor have they ever, really.

I think it's worth noting here that mezcalero is Lennart Poettering. His attitude is a seriously bad one if he's supposed to be one developing Free Desktop software.

Funny how LWN.net seems to be the one place where he is willing to stick his neck into discussions he don't control.

Portability is clearly important to him in the sense that it's brought up as a reason for him not have this or that feature in his software.

And he clearly has a point; at its worst it is a giant ball of YAGNI.

Do you think that Thompson and Ritchie gave a !%^$@ about Multics compatibility? Or OS/360?

Why do you call his attitude seriously bad? I agree with him, portability leads to complexity and therefore isn't worth it when you are trying to move fast. You may disagree that OSS should move fast, of course, but why should you want to slow down others?

Free software doesn't need to even support free operating systems, for that matter. I'm sure that there are Windows-only apps that are F/OSS, though I don't know of any off-hand. Of course the systemd developers don't need to support any other OS to write "Free Desktop" software, any more then the FreeBSD developers shouldn't feel compelled to port their filesystems, init-system, or anything else to Linux.

Because he's a developer for more than Linux services, he's also a developer for software like PulseAudio, which is supposedly meant to be kernel-agnostic. That is why I said Free Desktop software, not Free software. If he wants to restrict his viewpoint to the Linux kernel, that's his problem, but if he does, then he needs to stop pretending that he cares about Free Desktop environments and state that he's a Linux Desktop developer.

> PulseAudio, which is supposedly meant to be kernel-agnostic

Was this agnosticism part of the design?

And even if it was -- I suspect his experience has altered his view on it.

It's not so much his opposition to portability that bothers me personally, which I personally disagree with and think that it should be strived for to a reasonable degree.

Rather, it's his patently false and almost obnoxiously smug view of the BSDs as these slow-moving operating systems that simply follow Linux's trail, and his deeper implications of forking being negative and that Linux should play a game of catching up against OS X and Windows instead of doing its own thing.

Then his reasoning against portability seems self-defeating. He says that "i need to reach customers using windows" is a good reason, in which case you can substitute "windows" with any OS and have a purportedly valid reason for portability.

Not living in an arrogant monoculture that seriously believes you're leading the pack and everyone else is biting your dust sounds like another good reason.

> You may disagree that OSS should move fast, of course, but why should you want to slow down others?

This is a nonsense false dichotomy.

A herd is only as fast as their slowest member.

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