Open source software development is driven by global communities, and as is human nature, these communities will disagree, form factions, and advance their own agendas. When two or more groups have different opinions on an issue, they will compete to find a solution that everyone can accept, and sometimes things get confusing.
While your clean install of your latest Linux distribution of choice may seem like the product of the world, this software was created in the fire of a battle for the minds and market share of users like you. These are the three most important Linux wars that shaped the OS that rules the world today.
Holy war for freedom
The first great conflict in the history of Linux and all free and open source software was over That The fundamental question is: what does “free” mean in this context?
Hence the whole idea of “free as in freedom, not as in beer.” The Free Software Foundation or FSF (the organization behind the GPL licensing scheme) felt this was a moral issue. Code should remain open source forever, and if a commercial company writes new code to improve or extend open source software, it owes that code to the community on the same terms as the original code.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) took a different view. Founded in 1998, OSI was the first to come up with “open source” and the overall goal was to get businesses to adopt FOSS.
In practice, licensing generally allowed both philosophies, but with the release of the FSF license GPLv3. This included language and provisions prohibiting companies from blocking GPL software on consumer devices, as was the case with TiVo. Obviously, few companies would agree to a license that prevented them from blocking a device, so the release of GPL3 caused some controversy.
Notably, the Linux kernel remained under the GPLv2 license, and obviously this would be a problem for all the millions of devices running Linux if there was no legal way to block them. Either way, it's an ongoing debate that shapes Linux and every open source software to this day.
Tabletop wars without end
After all these years, a large selection of desktop environments still stands between KDE and GNOME. The main reason for GNOME's existence in the first place is that KDE relies on the Qt framework, which raises licensing concerns. Today, the Qt framework offers a dual licensing model, while the KDE desktop environment uses an open-licensed version of the software. So KDE is in fact completely open source, but at the time of GNOME's creation this was still a concern.
On another time scale, GNOME had never been developed and KDE might have been considered the only choice, but today this ideological split has resulted in two major variants of the desktop environment, and of course there are still further schisms and schisms within each camp.
Systemd vs. the old guard: the init war that tore Debian apart and split the community in two
The “initial war” is probably the most dramatic to date. The “initialization system” is the first program that runs after the kernel boots and controls services, logging, devices, and startup behavior. Systemd came with the promise of unifying and integrating this feature in a way that would fix problems with buggy shell scripts and annoying situations such as race conditions.
Sounds great, so what's the problem? The problem people have with systemd is not so much that it doesn't work or doesn't do its job well, but that it is philosophically at odds with how Unix and Unix-like operating systems are supposed to work. It concentrates most of the control in one place.
When Debian Linux – on which a huge number of Linux distributions built – decided to make systemd the default, and all hell broke loose. Of course, given that there is a FOSS community, the answer was to say “fork it”, and now we have Devoin. Debian fork without systemd. However, unless you argue with people about init systems on forums late into the night, you're probably using a systemd distribution, and it feels like modern Linux, for better or worse.
These are just three major and important conflicts that shaped Linux, and what's interesting to me about this is how open it all is, beyond the code. When it comes to a closed source OS like Windows, these are the kinds of conflicts and disputes that happen, but they happen behind closed doors. By the time the OS is released, everyone publicly follows this line.
With Linux, not only do we see all the dirty clothes aired, but there's nothing stopping you from participating and helping run things one way or another. Whether it's good is a question for another day, but no one can argue that it's not fun to watch!
8/10
- operating system
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Kubuntu 24.04 LTS
- CPU
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Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX (2.7 to 5.4 GHz)
- GPU
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nvidia geforce tx 5070 (DGPU), Intel Graphics (IGPU)
- RAM
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Dual channel DDR5 32GB 262-pin SODIMM (5600 MHz)
