The BSD community needs to stop blithering on about licences ad nauseum. It needs to stop dribbling on about software freedoms.
There is no reason for these two communities to be infighting, neither BSD nor Linux is better than the other - each has their own strengths and weaknesses, and can, in my eyes at least, live in a happy duality where Linux pushes the bleeding edge and BSD sits back and quietly achieves. But while the FOSS community at large bickers internally about licences and freedoms etc, Microsoft has been pushing forward with their stack. You can tie in Windows Server with IIS, MSSQL, Sharepoint, Exchange, Active Directory, Office and so on providing a centralied and manageable solution.And where the FOSS community can match these individual components one on one, as an entire stack I don’t believe we measure up. FreeBSD/Linux with Apache, PostGRES/MySQL, Drupal+wiki, Zimbra, LDAP, OpenOffice… can the lot interoperate on the same level? Oh no, let’s focus instead on arguing which is better: BSDL or GPL! *sigh*
So, to the FOSS community, I beg of you - gag the zealots, foster the BSD/GPL duality I mentioned and get on with the job. Stop bleating on about “this is the year of Linux on the desktop!” like we have been for the last decade, because while it may be true that we’re making inroads to the home user desktop, in the corporate space we’re still being measured against Microsoft. And until we can match or beat the Microsoft stack, we’ll stay exactly where we are now - bickering among ourselves.
It’s time the bazaar grew up and became a more civilised market.
