6 ms·

Part of the reason is that systemd has absorbed functionality of a number of additional pieces of software, to the point that they are no longer maintained disc

Part of the reason is that systemd has absorbed functionality of a number of additional pieces of software, to the point that they are no longer maintained discretely - udev being the best example. Another part of the reason is that Red Hat forcibly landed systemd in Fedora and then RHEL7, and RH is an elephant on the scale of Linux development.

MichaelGG 11y ago
So RedHat's choices impact Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, and SUSE so much? Honest question; I don't know the details. Or are you saying that distros rely on other components that are simply not feasible (maintained) anymore, so they have no choice? Just seems like if it's as bad as so many say, it just doesn't make sense for all these distros to blindly go along. Even the GNOME lockin doesn't seem like it'd explain it.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Debian isn't really a leader. They're more of a passive target platform and their committee has people from various strokes of the Linux community. As such, RH decisions with significant influence definitely would impact them. Ubuntu, in turn, is symbiotic with Debian, though still quite forked from it in most aspects beyond the packaging infrastructure (now with Snappy diverging even further). Nonetheless, Unity needs GNOME and Canonical are still a small player who are perfectly capable of foreseeing future trends. Adopting systemd is the path of least resistance and will help them track Debian's packages better. Most RPM-based distros (openSUSE included) tend to follow RH's direction, so that's not surprising. Besides, SUSE has always been enthusiastic about most desktop efforts. Arch Linux have at least two systemd developers on their team (Tom Gundersen and Dave Reisner). In fact, it was tomegun who wrote the Arch migration rationale: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530, based on the usual fallacious arguments (http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fall...). Also, distros have blindly went along with other bad ideas before. The most prominent examples were HALd and LSB-style initscripts. In fact, I'm not sure why you're at all surprised. Large groups of people in real life have collectively made far, far more catastrophic decisions. Why would a bunch of distribution maintainers adopting a piece of software be so shocking?
  - toyg 11y ago
    Systemd is pointing out the truth about lots of "emperor's clothes" in the current Linux ecosystem. When there were problems about a desktop manager revamp or some crashy audio daemon, you could liquidate certain choices as irrelevant or lazy. Now the entire ecosystem's guts are being rewritten by RedHat for RedHat, and the developer community is simply going along because, in practice, they have no other choice. Nobody else has the appetite, the manpower or the political weight to put together a competing project with a single chance of success. When chips are down, Red Hat owns Linux more than we like to admit.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      I suspect many didn't see it coming because systemd was under the freedesktop.org umbrella rather than a Red Hat fronted project. Thing is though that while freedesktop.org is presented as being about cooperation and compatibility between desktop environments, a very large portion of what happens there is dictated by Gnome. And Gnome is yet another project that on paper is independent, but with big RH contributions in terms of programming manpower (its the primary DE of both Fedora and RHEL). Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things.
      - embik 11y ago
        > Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things. This. The whole Linux community seems to be paranoid. It has to be a grand scheme, a plot to take over Linux, a conspiracy to kill "the UNIX way". Maybe it's just a group of guys solving their problems. I don't see how anything of this is really Red Hat's "fault". Seriously. They develop a piece of software which solves their problems. They also incorporate projects they already maintain to improve functionality and make developing things easier. It's their projects, they're allowed to do that. The code is still open. It's not like everybody (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc) didn't have the ability to fork udev. Yet all these projects chose not to fork the projects incorporated by systemd. Reason (1) might be it solves problems for them as well. There's no need to fork something that perfectly works for you. Reason (2) might be they don't have the resources. But that's a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole "Linux is built by community volunteers" thing. The people advising against "corporate influence" are not able to do anything of value in modern computing anymore (I'm well aware this is over-simplification, please bear with me). Requirements for software have changed. It's not 1970 anymore. And while the "old-school" users and devs are complaining about systemd & co, the "youngsters" are busy changing the ecosystem.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  Redhat does a lot of upstream development. By comparison Debian just has enough resources for keeping Debian running. SUSE seems to be an afterthought at this point. Ubuntu seems to mostly be concerned with itself.
  - bsder 11y ago
    > By comparison Debian just has enough resources for keeping Debian running. I think that's a touch unfair. The fact that Debian runs on the BeagleBone Black and RedHat doesn't puts a bit of lie to that statement.
    - weland 11y ago
      Red Hat has no reason to care about platforms like BeagleBone Black.
      - bsder 11y ago
        My comment was more the fact that Debian has enough excess resources to support the Beaglebone Black. So, categorizing Debian as having barely enough developers to support itself is disingenuous.
        weland 11y ago
        Nonetheless, Red Hat really is doing a lot of upstream development, certainly more than Debian does as far as I know. Indeed, the Debian community has managed to keep their release schedule and meet their goals lately, so they're probably in a better shape than "barely enough to support itself", but there hardly seems to be room for comparison between the two.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      If ARM became a big platform for servers or workstations, RH would probably roll out a ARM variant within the week (could be they even have test versions floating around their internal network). In particular as Fedora already have ARM versions across the board. https://arm.fedoraproject.org/ https://arm.fedoraproject.org/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- generic_user 11y ago
  At this point RedHat has consumed de-facto governance of some core projects that make up the Linux desktop system that sit atop the kernel. They pay developers to work on these projects and there employees have decision making authority. SystemD is almost entirely driven by current/former RedHat employees. The fact of the matter is that "Distros" like Debian etc are dependent on upstream developers to provide new versions of there system. If a large portion of important subsystems are developed by RedHat developers then they will adopt that code and be driven in the direction upstream wants to go. "Distros" do not develop, they package upstream into compiled binaries and add there configs and perhaps package management. In short most of the distros will bend which ever way the upstream wind blows. Thats why I use a "Distro" Like Slackware or Crux that is built from scratch and not based on another system. What limited autonomy there is in Linux land is with the independent Distros.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Ultimately you can go for something like Linux From Scratch. And even they have gotten somewhat fed up with the Systemd antic. For instance their main book use eudev rather than udev, because they found the effort of extracting udev from the larger systemd project a right pain. They do however maintain a parallel systemd book for anyone interested.
    - generic_user 11y ago
      Linux was/is an extremely flexible system. The vendors like RedHat should be able to refashion Linux in what ever way they see fit. The big problem with SystemD is that it stepped over the red line from in-house RedHat Linux component like SE-Linux and there various "enhancement" to a rigid default that attempts to lock down a large array of system components under a project that has commercial motives and drivers, driven by a single vendor. And it was done with a pre-meditated social engineering push which was quite nasty. Big no-no for Linux and Open Source eco-system in general. Projects Like Linux from scratch, GNU, Busybox etc will not role over for the endless attempts at vendor lockin. Its all been tried before and while the players may be new the game is very old and ultimately we will defeat these new attempts just like we did with SCO and the proprietary Unix/Microsoft Corporations that tried to kill Linux in the 90s.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  RH is the 800-pound gorilla of the Linux world. They employ a sizeable portion of the developers working on various projects within the Linux ecosystem. Canonical revenue is 67 million according to wikipedia, by contrast Red Hat is 1.5 billion. That is 3 extra zeros (and even then it is almost 1/100 of Microsoft's revenue).
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    There's plenty of Intel people involved as well, but their goals are mostly aligned.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Or at least don't clash. Intel is mostly involved on the hardware end. The biggest clash is perhaps Oracle, as they forked RHEL some years back. but i think that is more about shoring up a silo around their database business, rather than getting involved in the general workstation and server business. But that is a recent move, while RH has been in the Linux development effort for some time.
- skywhopper 11y ago
  In this case the decision does influence other people, because as pointed out, systemd has taken over many other components' roles, not just init, and if those components are no longer maintained because RedHat pulls its support, then other distributions (with far far fewer resources) are forced to use unmaintained code or switch to systemd.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Red Hat is definitely under no obligations to maintain things it doesn't see as a valuable, and if no one else wants to pick up the slack either then action and code speaks much more loudly then words about the actual value people assign those things.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gaius 11y ago
Yes systemd is Red Hat's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy for Linux.
- AdmiralACK 11y ago
  Redhat used to be good before they forked off the desktop OS into Fedora. They went downhill in my eyes quickly after that.
  - yeukhon 11y ago
    But isn't Fedora really is a bleed-edge version of CentOS? So what's the issue?
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      ISTM "bleed-edge version of CentOS" is a bit of an oxymoron. When has anything in that distro been current, to say nothing of cutting-edge?

MichaelGG 11y ago

So RedHat's choices impact Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, and SUSE so much? Honest question; I don't know the details. Or are you saying that distros rely on other components that are simply not feasible (maintained) anymore, so they have no choice? Just seems like if it's as bad as so many say, it just doesn't make sense for all these distros to blindly go along. Even the GNOME lockin doesn't seem like it'd explain it.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Debian isn't really a leader. They're more of a passive target platform and their committee has people from various strokes of the Linux community. As such, RH decisions with significant influence definitely would impact them. Ubuntu, in turn, is symbiotic with Debian, though still quite forked from it in most aspects beyond the packaging infrastructure (now with Snappy diverging even further). Nonetheless, Unity needs GNOME and Canonical are still a small player who are perfectly capable of foreseeing future trends. Adopting systemd is the path of least resistance and will help them track Debian's packages better. Most RPM-based distros (openSUSE included) tend to follow RH's direction, so that's not surprising. Besides, SUSE has always been enthusiastic about most desktop efforts. Arch Linux have at least two systemd developers on their team (Tom Gundersen and Dave Reisner). In fact, it was tomegun who wrote the Arch migration rationale: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530, based on the usual fallacious arguments (http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fall...). Also, distros have blindly went along with other bad ideas before. The most prominent examples were HALd and LSB-style initscripts. In fact, I'm not sure why you're at all surprised. Large groups of people in real life have collectively made far, far more catastrophic decisions. Why would a bunch of distribution maintainers adopting a piece of software be so shocking?
- toyg 11y ago
  Systemd is pointing out the truth about lots of "emperor's clothes" in the current Linux ecosystem. When there were problems about a desktop manager revamp or some crashy audio daemon, you could liquidate certain choices as irrelevant or lazy. Now the entire ecosystem's guts are being rewritten by RedHat for RedHat, and the developer community is simply going along because, in practice, they have no other choice. Nobody else has the appetite, the manpower or the political weight to put together a competing project with a single chance of success. When chips are down, Red Hat owns Linux more than we like to admit.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    I suspect many didn't see it coming because systemd was under the freedesktop.org umbrella rather than a Red Hat fronted project. Thing is though that while freedesktop.org is presented as being about cooperation and compatibility between desktop environments, a very large portion of what happens there is dictated by Gnome. And Gnome is yet another project that on paper is independent, but with big RH contributions in terms of programming manpower (its the primary DE of both Fedora and RHEL). Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things.
    - embik 11y ago
      > Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things. This. The whole Linux community seems to be paranoid. It has to be a grand scheme, a plot to take over Linux, a conspiracy to kill "the UNIX way". Maybe it's just a group of guys solving their problems. I don't see how anything of this is really Red Hat's "fault". Seriously. They develop a piece of software which solves their problems. They also incorporate projects they already maintain to improve functionality and make developing things easier. It's their projects, they're allowed to do that. The code is still open. It's not like everybody (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc) didn't have the ability to fork udev. Yet all these projects chose not to fork the projects incorporated by systemd. Reason (1) might be it solves problems for them as well. There's no need to fork something that perfectly works for you. Reason (2) might be they don't have the resources. But that's a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole "Linux is built by community volunteers" thing. The people advising against "corporate influence" are not able to do anything of value in modern computing anymore (I'm well aware this is over-simplification, please bear with me). Requirements for software have changed. It's not 1970 anymore. And while the "old-school" users and devs are complaining about systemd & co, the "youngsters" are busy changing the ecosystem.
Avshalom 11y ago
Redhat does a lot of upstream development. By comparison Debian just has enough resources for keeping Debian running. SUSE seems to be an afterthought at this point. Ubuntu seems to mostly be concerned with itself.
- bsder 11y ago
  > By comparison Debian just has enough resources for keeping Debian running. I think that's a touch unfair. The fact that Debian runs on the BeagleBone Black and RedHat doesn't puts a bit of lie to that statement.
  - weland 11y ago
    Red Hat has no reason to care about platforms like BeagleBone Black.
    - bsder 11y ago
      My comment was more the fact that Debian has enough excess resources to support the Beaglebone Black. So, categorizing Debian as having barely enough developers to support itself is disingenuous.
      - weland 11y ago
        Nonetheless, Red Hat really is doing a lot of upstream development, certainly more than Debian does as far as I know. Indeed, the Debian community has managed to keep their release schedule and meet their goals lately, so they're probably in a better shape than "barely enough to support itself", but there hardly seems to be room for comparison between the two.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    If ARM became a big platform for servers or workstations, RH would probably roll out a ARM variant within the week (could be they even have test versions floating around their internal network). In particular as Fedora already have ARM versions across the board. https://arm.fedoraproject.org/ https://arm.fedoraproject.org/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
generic_user 11y ago
At this point RedHat has consumed de-facto governance of some core projects that make up the Linux desktop system that sit atop the kernel. They pay developers to work on these projects and there employees have decision making authority. SystemD is almost entirely driven by current/former RedHat employees. The fact of the matter is that "Distros" like Debian etc are dependent on upstream developers to provide new versions of there system. If a large portion of important subsystems are developed by RedHat developers then they will adopt that code and be driven in the direction upstream wants to go. "Distros" do not develop, they package upstream into compiled binaries and add there configs and perhaps package management. In short most of the distros will bend which ever way the upstream wind blows. Thats why I use a "Distro" Like Slackware or Crux that is built from scratch and not based on another system. What limited autonomy there is in Linux land is with the independent Distros.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Ultimately you can go for something like Linux From Scratch. And even they have gotten somewhat fed up with the Systemd antic. For instance their main book use eudev rather than udev, because they found the effort of extracting udev from the larger systemd project a right pain. They do however maintain a parallel systemd book for anyone interested.
  - generic_user 11y ago
    Linux was/is an extremely flexible system. The vendors like RedHat should be able to refashion Linux in what ever way they see fit. The big problem with SystemD is that it stepped over the red line from in-house RedHat Linux component like SE-Linux and there various "enhancement" to a rigid default that attempts to lock down a large array of system components under a project that has commercial motives and drivers, driven by a single vendor. And it was done with a pre-meditated social engineering push which was quite nasty. Big no-no for Linux and Open Source eco-system in general. Projects Like Linux from scratch, GNU, Busybox etc will not role over for the endless attempts at vendor lockin. Its all been tried before and while the players may be new the game is very old and ultimately we will defeat these new attempts just like we did with SCO and the proprietary Unix/Microsoft Corporations that tried to kill Linux in the 90s.
digi_owl 11y ago
RH is the 800-pound gorilla of the Linux world. They employ a sizeable portion of the developers working on various projects within the Linux ecosystem. Canonical revenue is 67 million according to wikipedia, by contrast Red Hat is 1.5 billion. That is 3 extra zeros (and even then it is almost 1/100 of Microsoft's revenue).
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  There's plenty of Intel people involved as well, but their goals are mostly aligned.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Or at least don't clash. Intel is mostly involved on the hardware end. The biggest clash is perhaps Oracle, as they forked RHEL some years back. but i think that is more about shoring up a silo around their database business, rather than getting involved in the general workstation and server business. But that is a recent move, while RH has been in the Linux development effort for some time.
skywhopper 11y ago
In this case the decision does influence other people, because as pointed out, systemd has taken over many other components' roles, not just init, and if those components are no longer maintained because RedHat pulls its support, then other distributions (with far far fewer resources) are forced to use unmaintained code or switch to systemd.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Red Hat is definitely under no obligations to maintain things it doesn't see as a valuable, and if no one else wants to pick up the slack either then action and code speaks much more loudly then words about the actual value people assign those things.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gaius 11y ago

Yes systemd is Red Hat's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy for Linux.

AdmiralACK 11y ago
Redhat used to be good before they forked off the desktop OS into Fedora. They went downhill in my eyes quickly after that.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  But isn't Fedora really is a bleed-edge version of CentOS? So what's the issue?
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    ISTM "bleed-edge version of CentOS" is a bit of an oxymoron. When has anything in that distro been current, to say nothing of cutting-edge?