How did the ideology of libre/free software get so politicized?
I've noticed advocates for exclusively for libre software and actively discourage simple open source software for not going far enough, also want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned, and don't allow any critiques of the software they use because it's libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.
I thoroughly enjoy the code purity of what is labelled as libre software, for license I only like the ISC license for freedom. My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn't give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.
I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy. How network software is configured in systems that other people don't control, it doesn't matter if it's open source when people have no knowledge of other networks configuration.
On the principal of freedom, I do support the right to develop proprietary software. The fact that it exists does not harm anyone who chooses not to use proprietary software.
It seems the die hard libre software crowd, not open source people but the ones who want to live in an only GPLv3+ world can start to live in ther own world, their own bubble, and become disconnected losing perspective that which software other people use is not something that should affect your day in any way. Unless someone is both a network engineer and does infosec or something similiar, they're not in a position to understand fully appreciate how network protocols matter more than a license and code availability.
To discuss peop'e's skill and what productive things they use it for, take about make config options for world, kernel, ports, pf rules, do they use a hypervisor, LLVM/Clang, use it as a build server, basically what you call being harder I can real skills experience, not opinions.
Are you saying, when you talk to people who use Linux, they can't explain what they use it for? Or are you doing some weird gate-keeping because you've complied a kernel before?
To your last point, yea sure, you get lots of experience building software from scratch, configuring everything manually, etc etc. But doing things manually for no other reason than to do it that way is a huge waste of time (eg Gentoo and your BSD oses--although don't port and pgk sorta do it for you now?)
There are plenty of opinionated Linux gurus out there with experience and skills. The more experienced ones would probably get a chuckle at compiling software from source or debating make config options...when they can just use a package manager or a flatpak and get their job done in 20 seconds.
I don't mean it in a gatekeeping way. Since the BSD's do not have a GUI installer, none of them come with a desktop, you have to manually enable software installation, you edit your own startup daemons, it's more of an exact precision. We like to see each other's .conf files to see how they run their system.
There is binary pkgs and system updates, but compiling ports and comping the whole operatig system allows for different configuration options. I don't likebinary updates because they can be removed, but re-compiling the whole operating system while using it to run other things helps the patches all get mixed in with the other code so it's one solid fully covered systen, rather than installing and uninstalled patches. Code can stripped out, run in a different way, target the build for a different system. For example it's possible to build for different hardware than what a system is currently running on and export BSD over the network to another system to run.
There's native virtualization like jails on FreeBSD to run a FreeBSD installation within FreeBSD, or QEMU on OpenBSD.
I'm not gatekeeping, it's about technical skills and abilities, and sharing how each person runs the guts of the system. It comes from the original UNIX culture of sharing code and commands with each, sharing commonality with others who maintain networks and making suggestions about their system text files configuration.