Re: [tlug] Cultural differences

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Nguyen Vu Hung writes:

 > GNU project is a thing that stands in between. For persons who
 > doesn't work on the kernels, there will be no different because we
 > can use the same tools under BSD and Linux that GNU provides.

Er, no.  As long as we're talking about culture, it's important to
note that the BSD developers maintained completely separate trees of
the development toolchain as well as libc.  They were forced to use
GNU tools as the BSD people were unable to cherry-pick from GNU trees
and maintain their freedom, while GPL-licensed tools are full of BSD
code, and ended up better because they could use the best modules from
both worlds.

Many BSDers are still disgruntled, or may be a better word is
disheartened, about that, as they believe that GNU tools are in
general bloated overfeatured messes and are shocked (SHOCKED, I tell
you) at the relative success of GNU/Linux.  However, that is the goal
of BSD (may the best project win), whereas GNU will happily shoot off
its own feet with poorly chosen tools whose developers espouse
politically correct views (cf Stallman's Choice of infrastructure --
Bazaar for VCS and debbugs for tracker -- for Emacs).

My own opinion is not so much that GNU/Linux had better tools, but
that it provided a better environment for those who like bright shiny
things, as Linus's dictatorial development style made the Linux kernel
much more agile, and he was more open to destabilitizing features,
more willing to delegate decision-making power to lieutenants, versus
the relatively conservative *BSD cabals.  But once the balance of
features shifted to GNU, the GPL made it hard for BSD to catch up.