> Division [in the UNIX community] leads to wasted effort and political infighting, limiting the success.

Very true. Why do we need to have so many divisions, when we're all more or less wanting to make the same thing?

> wanting to make the same thing

That's not accurate. We want similar things, but there is a large amount of minor variation in the type of problems they are using their computers to solve. Fortunately, the focus on portability and simple, well-defined interface allowed multiple goals to coexist. It's not perfect, but even when variations between UNIX flavors breaks something, it is far easier to track down file-location bugs and text interfaces.

The toxic type of political infighting often (but not always) involves cases where someone decides to skip these traditions; conflict happens when someone tries to "remove old cruft" or "unify the various old methods" without first considering who it will impact. Unfortunately, this has become a common problem in recent years when JWZ's "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers"[1] started to take over some projects.

[1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Because the incentive structures were not aligned the way you/users wanted?

I can't pull down this pdf right now, or maybe it's this collection of slides from a talk by Robert Pike by the same name: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/slides.pdf

But based on the slides and the date I assume the "same thing" all these UNIX(TM) vendors wanted was for their combination of proprietary hardware and software to win in the marketplace.

Because how to arrive is as important as to where.