Everyone (and their mother) have been trying to convince me that I should use one of my less loaded servers to be a Fediverse node. However, all Fediverse software packages I checked only support being installed on complicated systemd + Docker machines. My servers don’t have either of those, because neither systemd nor Docker even exist on OpenBSD and illumos.
I know that it would be possible to manually install (e.g.) Lemmy, assuming that I won’t ever need official support, but I wonder why the world outside a limited subset of the Linux ecosystem is - at most - an afterthought for Fediverse developers.
How can I help to change that?
In my very personal opinion, there are a few not entirely unimportant advantages to using OpenBSD over Linux (and I suppose users of the other free BSDs have similar lists, but I no longer use any other free BSD):
sysupgrade
,reboot
,sysmerge
) - and it has never happened to me that after rebooting I was suddenly sitting in front of a completely different system. Yes, all this may not be cool - but predictability seems to me to be a not entirely irrelevant feature (also and especially for large companies).edit: See also my previous answer for further advantages.
To quote Linus Torvalds:
The GPL licence is not a free licence, rather the opposite. But let’s assume that the licence debate is actually relevant: Why should a company that needs to make money selling software be “antiquated” simply because (for example) some of its algorithms are trade secrets?