&gt;  it looks like a lot of &quot;political ideology vs technical purism&quot; drama…<p>That&#x27;s pretty much the history of the FSF and the GNU projects considering they were created for political&#x2F;ideological reasons (the Unix in &quot;GNU&#x27;s Not Unix&quot; is nonfree&#x2F;encumbered AT&amp;T UNIX, and the ideological underpinnings are what allowed Linux to overtake BSD during &quot;the troubles&quot; of the early 90s). The pulls ideological and technical pulls have oft conflicted.