Since people (especialy the unixers) usually do not bother specifying their OS

When *nix people don't specify their OS, I would like to think that it's usually because you can tell well enough what it is from the content of the post, or else it's not relevant to the question. When the question revolves around e.g. the /proc filesystem, is there any real need to specify that it's a Unix system? Even when it's something like a mod_perl question, it's a pretty good bet that it's some kind of *nix if the user doesn't say otherwise.

If OTOH the question is about something that's commonly done on other platforms (e.g., encoding audio files, doing stuff with Tk, or whatever), then *nix people ought to specify their OS if it's in any way relevant. I certainly would, though being a multibooter perhaps I'm slightly atypical. I'm sure there are those who neglect this, but there are Windows users who neglect to mention what OS they use as well -- the operating system is such a fundamental underlying thing that people have a tendency to take it for granted. This is true for most operating systems, especially the common ones. (Unix and Windows are by far the two most common. Windows is more common overall, but I suspect that among Perl users *nix is more common, because of Perl being included OOTB on almost all of those platforms.)

Of course, if the question is about some deeply-Perl thing like the efficiency of repeatedly unshifting an array, then the OS doesn't matter and will often not be specified, but in that case nobody's going to be tempted to post a non-Perl solution, are they?

I will also note that it's a mistake to universally identify Unix geeks with the open-source movement. My cousin's husband works quite a lot with HPUX; that doesn't have any bearing on his view of open source development. There are several other proprietary unices as well. AIX and Solaris are no more open-source than OS/2 or VMS, unless you count the fact that they ship with tools like Perl included out of the box. But if using Perl makes you a member of the open-source community, then that would include also the people who use Perl on Windows, wouldn't it?

There is a bias toward *nix systems within the Perl community's collective question-answering, but I suspect this results not so much from a big Zealotry Conspiracy as from the use of *nix examples in certain major Perl books, most notably the Camel, which probably results from Perl having been originally developed under Unix and ported to other systems later. Larry Wall uses some kind of Unix or another, I think, and so when questions are answered straight from his documentation, they tend to be Unix-oriented answers, unless they're pure Perl. It could also be partly because Unix systems all come with Perl included out of the box; on Windows you have to download and install it separately, so most Windows systems don't actually have Perl. (Microsoft would do themselves and their customers a big favour if they included ActiveState Perl with future versions of their OSes, but that's another thread.)

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