3 Linux wars that shaped the OS you use today

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Dec 30, 2025,
updated Dec 30, 2025

Quoting: 3 Linux wars that shaped the OS you use today —

Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:

Open-source software development is driven by global communities, and, in accordance with human nature, those communities will disagree, form factions, and push their own agendas. When two or more groups have a difference of opinion on something, they're going to compete to become the solution everyone accepts, and sometimes things get messy,

While your clean installation of the latest Linux distro of your choice might seem like the product of peace, that software was forged in the fires of battle for the minds and market share of users like you. These are three of the most important Linux wars that have shaped the OS that runs the world today.

Read on

Update

There seems to be a talk promoting more wars and muzzling:

• How to keep Open Source open without leaving our communities open to threats - media.ccc.de [iophk: she seems not to talk about Freedom and avoids mentioning it dodging the question indirectly by talking about the 1990s and not the 1980s, further she cite Microsoft GitHub and Microsoft Black Duck; tldr; problematic presenter, her stats are kind of BS, it's not time from founding it's time from 2020 or so... 90% have been attacked, so far; nowadays Code of Censorships cause many crises [and Code of Conduct (CoC) Committee = gatekeepers for billionaires] yet the talk promotes more of that - BS all the way through]

  The Four Freedoms (defined ~40 years ago) and the Four Opens (~15 years ago) for Open Source provided canonical definitions for what are the cornerstones of Open Source Software communities today. While the ethos still applies today, the cultural norms that blossomed to put it into practice are from an era with different challenges.