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> From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day.

The thing is, had BSD not had the unfortunate legal incident and had been adopted as the major free 'nix platform, then it would look very different than it does today. There would have been more and different developers, different backers, different agendas. Different small influences played out over 30 years.

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FreeBSD has always had a centralized development model that inoculates it against the kind of Linux churn that you see in terms of "different developers, different backers, different agendas".

Either you produce a careful, generalized solution, or it's rejected.

Yes, but in the presented hypothetical and over such a long time, the fact that it was able to maintain this in its current underdog role does not mean it would have been able to so as the main adopted 'nix.

I'm not sure it's fait acompli (I could be convinced!).

My thinking is: there's no requirement that a project not only accept just about any half-baked feature patch, but actually design an entire version control system to optimize for that use-case.

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