Well, in the case of “free development” we had some downsides from that as well.
Many of the GPL/OSF developers “in the wild” have no idea what it means to work “in the large” — ie, on millions of lines of code, with thousands of engineers.
We’d put changes into some of the development s/w we used and kick the changes out. Our changes had very definite purposes - supporting development “in the large.”
The “free development” we got in return was all too often our changes pulled out, or modified to a point where they were useless - because the ideologically pure developers on the outside knew oh-so-much better than us what was going on.
After awhile, we decided that we’d opt out of the “free” software movement and just contract with Cygnus to do our changes to tools and let them deal with the GPL/FSF/OSF mobs. We had contracts that feature X would be supported. We no longer cared how that happened - just that it did.
The next problem down my list of issues with the GPL/FSF crowd is this: while they’re often very talented in isolation, they most often don’t get along well with others, if at all. This is why there are so many forks in the Linux/GPL “movement” - these guys have the social graces of a barrel full of constipated and pissed-off badgers. They’re all so rigidly attached to their ideologies that they’re going to take their ideas and fork off from the group, which just distracts from a core mission.
Well, in the corporate world, almost nothing big and profitable is accomplished by lone wolves any more, and this is why much of their output is increasingly of little use.
In the BSD world, there isn’t the same tendency to playing the “screw you guys, I’m going home” games. FreeBSD, rather than have a mob of the masses and two high priests at the top, has a meritocracy where the work is spread out along functional lines, and those senior people in their particular functional area are gatekeepers. People have to get along more/better in the BSD model.
And it shows in the end result.
I’m not saying that nothing useful comes out of Linux - they certainly do some important and useful work, but in my experience, the Linux/GPL movement has created some big downsides for themselves.
Honestly, it’s not that Apple never had security issues, it’s that Apple never had the market share to make hacking or developing a virus for it worth it.
Now that Apple has increased it’s market share, hackers and the virus developers now have a reason to exploit the vulnerabilities that are inherent in any OS platform.
People have to realize that there is no such thing as a perfectly secure OS, you can secure any OS and make it completely unhackable, but that renders it’s almost useless for normal use.
Just look at the military’s definition of a completely secure computer, no mouse, keyboard, monitor, or network connection, that’s the only way they you can make any computer no matter what the OS secure.
So to all Apple computer users, welcome to the real world of greater market share and all it’s foibles.
hmm who has a bigger server presence in business BSD or Linux?
While that description of open source programmers exist, remember that who’s contributing depends on the product. For example, the majority of code changes for Linux these days comes from developers working for companies.
Of course for your case you also had the option of forking your own branch. People rarely fork because they can’t get along with each other. There’s one notable exception, but in his case his arrogance is matched by his skill.
Now, wait just a second there, hoss.
You are saying that the GNU/Linux people are unable to "get along," and promoting the superiority of the BSD crowd.
Probably the most infamous open source project leader is Theo De Raadt, of OpenBSD, who is notorious for not playing well with others. He has also criticized Linux developers for not insisting on open source drivers.