I spent a couple of decades being a die hard Linux fanatic, and contributor to many parts. The amount of work being done is incredible. But I'd have to say th

I spent a couple of decades being a die hard Linux fanatic, and contributor to many parts. The amount of work being done is incredible. But I'd have to say that I've become over time increasingly annoyed by the vast duplication of effort, pointless wheel reinvention and pointless scrapping of perfectly good code just because someone wanted to rewrite it rather than carefully refactor it. Looking at the long term effects over the last 20 years, a lot of that work was utterly pointless and detrimental; my patches to fix the GNOME canvas were ignored in the bug tracker for over a decade before it was closed--meanwhile they wrote in parallel over six replacements, all of which are now dead and none of which improved the canonical (and now also dead) implementation! All the power management and hardware abstraction stuff has gone through multiple rewrites from scratch, and with little thought to backward compatibility. This is not to denigrate the effort people put in, but effort needs to be directed effectively or else it is ultimately wasted. The success of Linux has lead to a disturbing amount of NIH attitudes--we're so big we don't need to care about compatibility and interoperability--foolishly forgetting that these things are what caused the original adoption of Linux, being compatible with everything under the sun was it's big selling point. In the case of Btrfs it's a laudable effort, but has yet to approach production readiness in an awfully long time. Even if the licences are incompatible, the on-disk structures of ZFS could have been used to create a compatible implementation. So I'm afraid I'm increasingly using other systems such as FreeBSD (with ZFS) and leaving Linux behind somewhat. Ultimately open systems, open standards and free software and software freedom are more important than a single implementation.