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Community: Flame Wars Make Great Software

[ Thanks to Amos
Batto
for this article. ]

Many people bemoan the unceasing bickering and so called “holy
wars” in the Free/libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) world. The
process of repeatedly redrawing battle lines such as vi vs emacs
(and emacs vs xemacs), xfree86 vs xorg, KDE vs GNOME, BSD vs Linux,
and the Free Software Foundation vs the Open Source Initiative is
an essential part of what makes FLOSS into great software.

As painful as it may be to watch, the divisions, factionalism,
and emotionalism are fundamental to the process of creating FLOSS
and can’t be excised without diminishing the software itself.

“Many commentators write articles deploring the fanaticism of
FLOSS partisans. Even people who are sympathetic to FLOSS and
appreciate its qualities, frequently denounce the divisions in the
FLOSS community. A typical expression of this sentiment is Rollie
Hawk’s article “You
mean even Linux isn’t cool enough now?

According to Hawk, “Most rational human beings would agree that
the flame wars over operating systems are ignorant at least and
pointless at best.” Hawk argues that “the battle between
aficionados of Linux and BSD is not only silly but hurts both
parties with every attack.” The article denounces many of the
admittedly silly and petty reasons that BSD partisans think their
OS is “cooler” and urges everyone on both sides of the Linux vs BSD
divide to stop bickering and to realize that “we are all on the
same side
.”

Hawk concludes:

“…we are all–or so I thought–supposed to be on the
side of making people’s lives and jobs more easy, productive, and
fun with technology. How that happens is of drastically
less importance than the fact that it does
happen…”

While Hawk incisively exposes many of the fallacies in the
arguments over BSD vs Linux, he also disregards the whole point of
BSD and Linux and the technical substance of the debates. Hawk
writes from the point of view of a desktop user who has no desire
to get under the hood and plumb the inner mysteries of the
technology. He argues that for the average user it makes not a wit
of difference whether the desktop is running on top of a BSD or
Linux kernel. In denouncing the flame wars, Hawk ignores that the
flame wars are often predicated upon differing visions that drive
the development of the kernels. BSD was never meant to be the most
accessible OS, which seems to be one of Hawk’s chief criteria.
Rather, it was designed to be the best OS in some aspect.

For instance, the raison d’etre for OpenBSD is to provide the
best security, while NetBSD is designed to be the best at
networking. There are plenty of good reasons why people might
prefer BSD over Linux for these features, but Hawk entirely ignores
these reasons when he cavalierly dismisses the flame wars as
“ignorant at least and pointless at best.” The various groups
working on the BSD kernel have their own vision of what is the best
design and for this reason they have hived into multiple varieties
such as NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD.

Meanwhile the Linux kernel is more open and accepts code from a
wide variety of sources, because Linux developers never claimed to
create the perfect design, but rather pragmatically
created a kernel that was good enough to work for most
people and their sundry hardware. These fundamental differences in
vision are what drove the various kernel projects to excel, and
shouldn’t be dismissed as merely “pointless”.

Since many commentators like Hawk argue from the point of view
of the average desktop user, they assume that most users don’t care
what kind of software is under the hood. They often assume that all
FLOSS is the same to the average user. Nonetheless, desktop users
who has no use for technical details may have political reasons to
care exactly what software is under the hood. Debates of BSD versus
Linux are often interesting to people who don’t worry about run
levels and kernel modules. Some flavors of Linux, unlike BSD,
aspire to take away market share from Microsoft and break its
monopoly on the desktop. Many desktop users do care about breaking
Microsoft’s power over their digital futures and support Linux for
that reason. Many desktop users do think it is vitally important
that proprietary companies not gain the power to control their
lives or to embrace and extend standards so that their
information is held captive to the whims of a corporation.

Because the BSD license is not designed to challenge industry
practices which would restrict freedoms and lock them into
detrimental monopolies, many desktop users do care whether they are
running BSD or Linux under the hood. Freedom and social justice are
issues that profoundly matter to all types of users, even those who
don’t give a hoot about the inner workings of the technology. Many
people who haven’t the faintest idea how to use a command line are
eagerly installing OpenOffice and FireFox because they value their
freedom. For many, especially in Europe and the developing world,
the politics are one of the primary reasons given for switching to
FLOSS. Even people who don’t see their desktop as a political
manifesto generally agree that their lives and jobs won’t be very
“easy, productive, and fun” in a proprietary world filled with
expensive and restrictive software, Digital Rights Management, and
frequent invasions of personal privacy.

For desktop users who aren’t fans of the free software movement
and its efforts to change the world, many have firm reasons for
choosing other software. They may wish to support BSD-style
licenses which gives them the most libertarian freedom to do
whatever they want with their computer. Still other desktop users
may think it important to support Linus and the open source
advocates who encourage more openness in their development
methodology than BSD. Others may prefer programs because they are
free-market advocates who want business friendly software. In
short, we shouldn’t dismiss the flame wars in the FLOSS community
as “ignorant” or “pointless,” nor should we regard them as the
rarified purview of elite hackers and developers.

Although some of the arguments in the flame wars may be
wrongheaded and even down right silly, there are very real
differences in philosophy and technical matters which do matter and
we ought to understand and respect them, even if we don’t chose to
participate in these debates. More importantly, we should recognize
that the flame wars and partisanship serve a vitally important
purpose. FLOSS is about more than the mere tools themselves, it is
about people’s ability to become cocreators in technology and
taking ownership of the technology which governs their lives. Part
of that process is the ability to humans to build identities and
communities around those tools.

In a profound way, FLOSS is a social movement and people don’t
get involved unless they are emotionally committed in some way.
Part of showing your affiliation and membership in a FLOSS project
is the human need to create cultural differentiation, common
mythologies, and the flame wars which Hawk so deplores. What makes
FLOSS projects work is the ability of people to share a common
vision to create something better, but creating visions is
inherently political and replete with divisive debate. Even as
FLOSS has increasingly moved out of hacker subculture and into
corporate quarters, people’s participation is still a profoundly
human experience which brings out all the human emotions. While the
cultural divisions aren’t as recognizable as in the hacker
subculture, the FLOSS corporate world has many of the same human
rivalries and internal disagreements.

The emotional involvement of the FLOSS community is not a fact
to deplore, but rather an element to embrace as part of what makes
FLOSS work. We don’t want FLOSS developers to treat their software
as simply a way to get a paycheck as is done by many software
developers in the proprietary world. People’s sense of
identification with a FLOSS project and their sense of ownership
over the final product are what drives FLOSS communities to make
software which is so stable and bug-free, yet also drives them to
engage in endless flame wars and partisan bickering.

Average desktop users are a vital part of this process and
should not be excluded. They won’t file bug reports, endure long
downloads, and spread the software to their neighbors, without the
emotional commitment and the concomitant partisanship. While the
average user doesn’t have to participate in the FLOSS world, they
should recognize that FLOSS only works because people like RMS and
ESR engage in holy wars and Linus feels so emotionally committed to
creating great software that he excoriates the GNOME designers as
being “interface nazis” whose mentality is a “disease.” This sort
of passion drives the FLOSS projects and makes them compete to
outdo other projects. In other words, what many dismiss as
“ignorant” and “pointless” is exactly what makes FLOSS worth using
in the first place.

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