The difference between the competition we have now and the 'UNIX wars' is all a matter of licensing. With the latter, proprietary licensing caused a large part of this fragmentation as there was no easy way of using code from one project in another to preserve compatibility.

Today, most of these projects are FOSS, so the risk of another '*nix war' has been negated to the point of being a non-issue.

> Today, most of these projects are FOSS, so the risk of another '*nix war' has been negated to the point of being a non-issue.

Go tell that to the users that are not on the few chosen distributions for commercial vendors or without ready made packages on their repositories.

Or the BSD guys that are being left out with some desktop stuff being slowly tied to Linux systems.

All this happens because developers choose to leave out support for certain systems in order to minimize development efforts.

Nothing is stopping the users of those Linux distributions from grabbing the source code and dependencies and compiling any program not in their package repository, or from grabbing a different package manager like pkgsrc, and many proprietary Linux programs that are tied to a particular distro e.g. Steam have been shown to work on other distros with minimal effort.

And in regards to the BSDs, what exactly are you referring to? If it's Wayland, that's being ported. If it's KMS drivers, Intel has been ported and radeon is in the process. Nouveau probably won't be ported due to the fact that they already have a pretty stable binary Nvidia driver.

The only two things I can think of that aren't compatible with BSD have both been designed with exclusively Linux by the developers heading those projects, SystemD and ALSA, and even then the BSDs already have suitable substitutions with those, init and OSS.

So, since there's greater cross-compatibility than ever before, how would you suppose that another nix war would erupt?

Oh yes, I have forgotten that user ==> developer.