Oct 24, 2026, 11:58 AMIt was enabled by all of the people who framed F/OSS operating systems adversarially and decided that making ‘Linux software’ was more important than making portable F/OSS that ran on a load of different platforms.
When I started getting involved in F/OSS, portable code was a mark of quality. If your software was x86-only, or ran on only one OS, it was seen as poor quality. Between then and around 2010, a load of projects went from ‘we create great software for *NIX systems’ to ‘we target Linux but take patches for other systems if anyone wants to deliver them’ and then finally to ‘we develop Linux software, if you want to run anywhere else maybe you can maintain a downstream fork but we’ll probably break it every few days’.
Some of that shift was from companies shipping Linux software, but a lot was community-led projects.
This created a single point of failure. As long as most Linux software ran on various other platforms (Minix, BSDs, OpenSolaris derivatives, and so on), Linux was just another replaceable component. Don’t like the direction it’s taking? Pick one of the other options. But as soon as the software you care about became ‘Linux software’ that might run elsewhere, you’ve consolidated power into whoever controls Linux.
The outcome of this was, shockingly, exactly the same thing as happens every time a large group of people decide to give control of something important to a small group of people.