Re: What *should* the B in BSD stand for?

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."