I agree somewhat with Lennart. The Libre/OSS community is full of egotistical asshats -- generally western and in their 30s and 40s. What's funny, though, is that not all camps in the community are that bad. The Linux camp has deteriorated in recent years -- I've noticed it myself on several occasions. The BSD camps don't suffer near as much from the nonsense that occurs on the Linux side. I think there are several reasons for this. One I have notice in person working on both sides is that the BSD crews tend to be more professional overall. They love UNIX and the goal has always been to create the best UNIX-like OS around. The BSD license is arguably better IMO as well. Quite a few Linux devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and tend to be vocal closed-source opponents for the sake of being vocal. The world cannot be all closed source or all open source. There is room for everyone. Most of the issues with people I have had over the three decades I've been in IT have been with Linux-based devs and users. Without exception all BSD guys and girls have been the pinnacle of professionalism. I think this speaks volumes and is quite telling. This is not observation from one workplace -- this is over many, many years in different work spaces, different cultures, states, whatnot.
All things considered, I have been seriously thinking of moving my core infrastructure over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD to avoid the coming (well, here already) continued balkanisation of Linux. The code quality of Linux has deteriorated of late as well. I've noticed it. My BSD test boxes running the same software suffer nary a hitch. Debian seems to be sane still, as does Slackware, but for how long. This ridiculous systemd battle is bonkers.
Interesting viewpoint; I don't have the same perception, but communities are big, so you might be right. Do you mean purely the sysadmin community in workplaces, or also the developer community? For developer communities, the BSD world seems to have a pretty wide range of community friendliness, but I wouldn't describe it as uniformly pleasant and professional. Certainly the OpenBSD community is not that: there are many good things about de Raadt, but the tone he sets is more one of combative-and-right than pleasant-and-professional (and he's not the only one in the community with that tone). He's no less prone to flamage than Torvalds, anyway. The only really friendly BSD developer community I've encountered is the NetBSD one, which seems to make an active effort at cultivating a certain ethos. FreeBSD is maybe somewhere in between, though I think trending friendlier compared to some years ago. Some sub-communities are also quite pleasant, like the ZFS one (which lives a bit more in Illumos-land, but has a lot of BSD contributors as well).
I'm talking devs and sysadmins. I agree with you that NetBSD is the friendliest of the bunch.
Theo de Raadt is a great guy. He gets a bad rap when it's undeserved. What the OBSD guys is very serious stuff. He gets a lot of flak but running an OS and security software project as successfully as he does takes a strong personality. He has that, and in the real, he's a nice, friendly guy. He simply has no tolerance for people with no merit and nothing to add. Anyone would be the same.
I've met a couple of snarky FreeBSD admins, but they were also Linux and Windows admins at the same time. These two guys were full of themselves regardless of platform.
BSD (in general) tends to be more polished than Linux and suffers fewer bugs out of the box. Again, this is what I've noticed. I've yet, in almost 20 years of using FreeBSD off and on, ever had an issue with it that was a deal breaker. I cannot say this of the various Linux distros.
I've never used BSD before, but from reading FreeBSD's BSD vs Linux [0], I can't see a major difference aside of the license, and the number of distributions available. Can you please explain what made you go on off using BSD/Linux?
I have noticed over the last ten or so years that FreeBSD in particular is ridiculously stable -- far more so than any Linux distro I have tried, including Red Hat, CentOS, and Debian.
I have stable Linux machines running Debian and I have FreeBSD test machines running the same software. FreeBSD uses less resources (exact same HW), tends to be slightly faster, and is arguably easier to admin on a daily basis. Let's not even mention ZFS, which is remarkable in its own right. I'm impressed. I once ran an OpenBSD pf firewall that supported almost 200 users on some seruously underpowered HW. This thing's load average was always ridiculously low. Ditto FreeBSD now. What will cause the Debain machines to peak out sometimes, FreeBSD doesn't seem to notice. Interesting and a bit impressive.
I also like both FreeBSD and Debian (have no real experience with the others). But on performance it varies a lot by workload. To take two examples: over the years at any given point in time, FreeBSD has had a better networking stack than Linux, but worse scalability to large numbers of cores. Though there is some ongoing sponsored work on the latter [1,2].
I really don't appreciate the ageism in this comment. It's unbelievable that in this industry you don't meet 20-something asshats so that you have to single out people in their 30s and 40s.
Grown men? You could've just said "adults". You're making an implication you don't want to, I hope, and one which needlessly maligns a whole group of people. That's the same thing pekk was responding to, albeit less explicit. Nobody likes reading "your demographic, specifically, is horrible." Saying it is unproductive and damages the speaker's credibility as someone with politesse - a particularly bad thing in this conversation, given its topic. It is entirely possible to call out ashattery without resorting to prejudice.
But what about young men? Or young women? Or grown women?
While I don't necessarily agree with pekk that saying "30s and 40s" is ageism or discriminatory at all, saying "[people] are never offended at stuff like this" is exactly the problem the tech community is trying to solve with being more inclusionary of other people and cultures. Yes, people do get offended at offensive remarks. No, not everyone sees them a joke.
You tried to open a flame war over licenses in discussion about hostile attitude in the open source community. Great work.
"The GPL license is arguably better IMO as well. Quite a few BSD devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and tend to be vocal copy-left opponents for the sake of being vocal."
All things considered, I have been seriously thinking of moving my core infrastructure over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD to avoid the coming (well, here already) continued balkanisation of Linux. The code quality of Linux has deteriorated of late as well. I've noticed it. My BSD test boxes running the same software suffer nary a hitch. Debian seems to be sane still, as does Slackware, but for how long. This ridiculous systemd battle is bonkers.