> I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source.
Could the reason that idea is so hard to get over be because it's just wrong?
I don't think these people "hated" UNIX because it was "open," I think they hated it because they thought it was bad.
They didn't hate Unix because it was open, but their hatred of a more open system does make them look a bit ridiculous: Any system tied to a single company is doomed anyway, either to the company dying or the company discontinuing it and/or turning it into something you can't stomach. (Microsoft lives, but how happy are MS-DOS partisans these days?) It kinda taints their technical points with a whiff of fanboyism, a naïve partisanship and attachment to entities that didn't give a shit about them.
LOL. Man, most Unixen in the 90's where as corporate as Microsoft, Linux was still a Usenet hobbyist project and 386BSD was sunk into lawsuits.
Proper hacker projects died a few years ago with the end of the PDP10/ITS/Emacs and the GNU project was still working on a replacement for that platform but cloning Unix with Emacs/Info and so on top of that because of convenience with 'modern' times.
Could the reason that idea is so hard to get over be because it's just wrong?
I don't think these people "hated" UNIX because it was "open," I think they hated it because they thought it was bad.