> The tight coupling, the non-portability, all of that are technical choices, that can be debated on their own merit
They can't. GNU was a political project from day 1, with explicitly political goals; the unix-like design is for political, not technical, reasons.
> Projects merged changes because they wanted them, not because their goodwill was abused to make them merge anything.
Citation needed. If you maintain a widely-used open-source project there's a pretty strong social norm/pressure to merge contributions that don't have anything obviously wrong with them, even if the functionality they implement is something you don't actually want or need.
> People got systemd on their OSes because they chose OSes whose developers chose to move to systemd.
Because they chose OSes whose non-technical leadership chose to move to systemd, in violation of the project constitution, and then had the rump technical committee rubber-stamp it once the principled technical leadership had resigned in disgust and the decision was already a fait accompli, the way I remember it.
> It's not like Lennart comes to your home with a gun if you install OpenBSD.
Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. No, Lennart won't hack into your computer with an SSH exploit, but he'll get the software you're using (like Gnome) to push updates that stop it working on your computer, and so the end result ends up much the same.
They can't. GNU was a political project from day 1, with explicitly political goals; the unix-like design is for political, not technical, reasons.
> Projects merged changes because they wanted them, not because their goodwill was abused to make them merge anything.
Citation needed. If you maintain a widely-used open-source project there's a pretty strong social norm/pressure to merge contributions that don't have anything obviously wrong with them, even if the functionality they implement is something you don't actually want or need.
> People got systemd on their OSes because they chose OSes whose developers chose to move to systemd.
Because they chose OSes whose non-technical leadership chose to move to systemd, in violation of the project constitution, and then had the rump technical committee rubber-stamp it once the principled technical leadership had resigned in disgust and the decision was already a fait accompli, the way I remember it.
> It's not like Lennart comes to your home with a gun if you install OpenBSD.
Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. No, Lennart won't hack into your computer with an SSH exploit, but he'll get the software you're using (like Gnome) to push updates that stop it working on your computer, and so the end result ends up much the same.