3 Linux wars that shaped the OS you use today
Open source software development is driven by global communities and, consistent with human nature, these communities will disagree, form factions, and advance their own agendas. When two or more groups have a difference of opinion on something, they will compete to become the solution accepted by everyone, and sometimes things get messy.
While your fresh install of the latest Linux distribution of your choice may seem like the product of peace, this software was forged in the heat of battle for the minds and market share of users like you. These are three of the most important Linux wars that shaped the operating system that runs the world today.
The holy war for freedom
The first major conflict in the history of Linux and all free and open source software was over THE fundamental question: what does “free” mean in this context?
This is where the idea “free as in freedom, not as in beer” comes from. The Free Software Foundation or FSF (the organization behind the GPL licensing system) considered this to be a moral issue. Code should remain open forever, and if a for-profit company writes new code to improve or expand on open software, it owes the community that code on the same terms under which the original code was released.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) had a different view. Created in 1998, OSI was the one that invented “Open Source”, and the general objective was to get companies to adopt free software.
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In practice, licenses generally allowed both philosophies, but with the release of the GPLv3 license by the FSF. This included language and provisions aimed at preventing companies from locking GPL software on consumer devices, as in the case of TiVo. Obviously, few companies would agree to a license that would prevent them from locking a device, which is why the release of GPL3 was somewhat controversial.
It’s telling that the Linux kernel remained GPLv2, and it would obviously be a problem for the millions of devices running Linux if there was no legal way to lock them down. Regardless, this is an ongoing debate that shapes Linux and all open source software to this day.
Endless office wars
After all these years, the main choice of desktop environment is still between KDE and GNOME. One of the main reasons GNOME exists is primarily because KDE relies on the Qt framework, which has raised concerns about licensing. Today, the Qt framework offers a dual-licensed model and the KDE desktop environment uses the openly licensed version of the software. So KDE is actually completely open source, but in the early days of GNOME this was still a concern.
In another era, GNOME was never developed and KDE might have been the only choice, but today this ideological divide has resulted in two main desktop environment options and, of course, other divisions and schisms still occur within each camp.
Systemd versus the old guard: the boot war that tore Debian apart and split the community in two
To date, the “initialization war” has probably been the most dramatic. The “boot system” is the first program to run after loading the kernel and it manages services, logging, devices, and boot behavior. Systemd came with the promise of unifying and integrating this feature in a way that would address issues with buggy shell scripts and tricky situations like race conditions.
This 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 a good job, but that it is philosophically opposed to how Unix and Unix-like operating systems should work. It concentrates a lot of control in one place.
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When Debian Linux, on which a large number of Linux distributions are built, decided to make systemd its default, all hell broke loose. Of course, the FOSS community being what it is, the response was to say “fork it” and so now we have Devuan. A systemless Debian fork. However, if you’re not arguing with people about init systems on forums until the wee hours of the night, you’re probably using a systemd distribution, and it seems to be modern Linux for better or worse.
These are just three major and important conflicts that have shaped Linux, and what interests me about this topic is how open it all is beyond just code. When it comes to a closed operating system like Windows, these are exactly the kinds of conflicts and arguments that happen, but they happen behind closed doors. The moment the operating system ships, everyone publicly falls into line.
With Linux, not only do we see all the dirty laundry aired, there’s also nothing stopping you from participating and helping make things happen in some way. Whether that’s a good thing is a question for another day, but no one can deny that it’s not fun to watch!
8/10
- Operating system
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Kubuntu 24.04 LTS
- Processor
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Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX (2.7 GHz up to 5.4 GHz)
- GPU
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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (dGPU), Intel Graphics (iGPU)
- RAM
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32 GB 262-pin dual-channel DDR5 SODIMM (5600 MHz)
