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Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC. Now, there's a case to be made that the public statements of intent did not necessarily correspond

Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC. Now, there's a case to be made that the public statements of intent did not necessarily correspond to the actual function, or strategy that made systemd emerge. Quoting from Lennart Poettering's Linux Voice interview [1]: > We, at that time, thought: OK, Upstart is the future! Scott understood how init systems work – it needs to be dynamic, it needs to react to events, and it’s not the static thing that Sysvinit was. So we thought that was the way of the future, but as it progressed, we realised it probably wasn’t the future, because we realised that conceptually, it was the wrong design. Now, furthermore, the goal of systemd became "universal GNU/Linux middleware," a massively increased scope relative to what Upstart was intended to be. Though it may have been the case that Upstart could have evolved into something similar to systemd-the-PID1, it appears to me that systemd's emergence would nevertheless have been determined by the desire for a homogeneous catch-all userland suite. The Upstart architecture, relying on so-called "bridges" at the time to marshall external events to and from the internal format, would likely not have been as desirable. LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR. [1] http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/ http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/

cwyers 11y ago
> LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR. No it doesn't. There is no reason that "conceptually, it was the wrong design" has to contradict with "they had different ideas to me, and couldn't contribute them because of the CLA" and "it could have quite easily evolved into what systemd looks like today, with an active community working on it." It is quite easy to read those statements as being in agreement -- Lennart decided that Upstart wasn't conceptually correct, SJR is amenable to discussing merging changes that would bring Upstart in line with Lennart's ideas, but the CLA is a roadblock so Lennart goes off to form his own project. Why not adopt the principle of charity and take everyone at their word?
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence. Discussing historical counterfactuals like this based on limited public testimony is a difficult matter, but my input here is that the ultimate breadth of changes envisioned by the systemd developers would have triggered a split anyway. SJR's comments concern systemd-the-PID1.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    > Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence. Is there any reason, any at all, that you've provided to think that Lennart wouldn't have abandoned that project to contribute to Upstart, if the CLA issue had been able to be overcome? Because the testimony of people who would actually know this indicates that he would have. I mean, I'm happy to drop this argument if you find it a "difficult matter," but it seemed to matter to you enough to bring it up in the first place, and you seem to be focusing on trivialities that you think support your point rather than some pretty unambiguous statements from people who would know (and it seems hard to accuse SJR of some sort of pro-Red Hat bias ehre).
digi_owl 11y ago
> Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC. Something that can make a guy wonder if the root of the issue is Suse, as apparently that distro has always been "weird". Something that may well be a outcome of a corporate culture that former employees are now bringing with them to others. As for LP's story not lining up with others. Not surprised. Best i can find the guy has never told a consistent account of things. The goal posts are forever moving.

cwyers 11y ago

> LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR. No it doesn't. There is no reason that "conceptually, it was the wrong design" has to contradict with "they had different ideas to me, and couldn't contribute them because of the CLA" and "it could have quite easily evolved into what systemd looks like today, with an active community working on it." It is quite easy to read those statements as being in agreement -- Lennart decided that Upstart wasn't conceptually correct, SJR is amenable to discussing merging changes that would bring Upstart in line with Lennart's ideas, but the CLA is a roadblock so Lennart goes off to form his own project. Why not adopt the principle of charity and take everyone at their word?

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence. Discussing historical counterfactuals like this based on limited public testimony is a difficult matter, but my input here is that the ultimate breadth of changes envisioned by the systemd developers would have triggered a split anyway. SJR's comments concern systemd-the-PID1.
- cwyers 11y ago
  > Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence. Is there any reason, any at all, that you've provided to think that Lennart wouldn't have abandoned that project to contribute to Upstart, if the CLA issue had been able to be overcome? Because the testimony of people who would actually know this indicates that he would have. I mean, I'm happy to drop this argument if you find it a "difficult matter," but it seemed to matter to you enough to bring it up in the first place, and you seem to be focusing on trivialities that you think support your point rather than some pretty unambiguous statements from people who would know (and it seems hard to accuse SJR of some sort of pro-Red Hat bias ehre).

digi_owl 11y ago

> Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC. Something that can make a guy wonder if the root of the issue is Suse, as apparently that distro has always been "weird". Something that may well be a outcome of a corporate culture that former employees are now bringing with them to others. As for LP's story not lining up with others. Not surprised. Best i can find the guy has never told a consistent account of things. The goal posts are forever moving.