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This man makes valid points about the state of GNU and BSD. I've been tempted to leave linux completely as of late, but the truth of the matter is that I love G

This man makes valid points about the state of GNU and BSD. I've been tempted to leave linux completely as of late, but the truth of the matter is that I love GNU too much to go. Yes, RMS is pretty pegged on the autistic scale, but he's not wrong, and Snowden proved that GNU as an ideology is pretty much our only hope against nation states intending to deprive us of our freedoms. GNU is the closest thing to a soul the software industry could have, demanding nothing less than freedom for the users of software and writers of software. Their (not) unix is a beautiful thing to look at, and companies like Novell/SuSE and Red Hat built their empires on its foundation. Now, Red Hat is taking an active role in rewriting everything but the kernel, in order to push-out and/or marginalize the GNU crowd. If they were honest, they would have Poettering come out and state publicly that they are creating a replacement Operating System for the linux kernel. but they're not. They're wrapping themselves in the GPL (and the goodwill that comes with it) while trying to destroy Stallman's creation. Red Hat has quietly declared war against GNU, and those that support it, embracing and promoting the watered-down (and far more profitable) "open source" concept as they go. In that war, systemd is merely another salvo that (I think) began either with Havoc Pennington writing dbus off the back of Nat Friedman of Ximian's hard work and research, or their complete takeover of freedesktop.org. NetworkManager, Avahi, and PulseAudio being pushed into all the distributions, always long before they were stable (and all written by Poettering), proved with a paper trail that they had worked the kinks out of their embrace-and-extend plan long before systemd was ever mentioned on a debian mailing list for adoption. I wish the author well, but some of us are gonna stick around to try and keep GNU strong against this new threat. We've lost Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu, but this war is far from over.

pdkl95 11y ago
Well said. It's too bad some people seem to believe down-voting the truth will make their cognitive dissonance go away. > They're wrapping themselves in the GPL ...while encouraging a development style that isolates processes so they use IPC when they should be simply linking to a library and making a function call. Systemd depends heavily on dbus, because it ties developers into this model. This enables a rather convenient way for freeloading propriety software to use GPL code, without having to be subject to the requirements of GPL code. If you get some package to provide their services over dbus, you only have to "use" the software instead of linking against a library. Even ignoring systemd's bad design that tightly couples together services that worked fine as separate specs for decades, and even ignoring the terrible "we don't give a crap if we break your environment for no reason" attitude that is common among systemd's authors, this end-run around the GPL is a very good reason to avoid systemd. Now, I'm sure some people in this thread think I'm making crap up, being paranoid, or similar. To those people I say: when are you going to start paying attention? This is obvious when you look at the Linux community over the last 20 years. Stop being distracted by technical features instead of investing in your future. Are you going to be happy when all distros are de facto variants of Red Hat? Some of you might be, but if you're going to ignore the vast majority of Linux and Unix, could you at least fork the project instead of dragging the rest of the community down with you?\
- the_why_of_y 11y ago
  So let me get this straight - you are arguing simultaneously that systemd's DBus APIs should be library calls, and that systemd should be less tightly coupled? Please tell me this is a parody?
  - e12e 11y ago
    You're aware there are a number of different libc-implementations one can choose from, right?
    - anonbanker 11y ago
      in case he/she isn't, I'll just mention musl and uClibc.
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    I love that you ignored the point of his argument: that systemd is an end-run around the GPL, in order to make it more accessible for proprietary malware.
- jhkjhk 11y ago
  But BSD init is more horrible in this regard: by using shell script, it is easy to incorporate proprietary code into an otherwise copyleft product. The proponents of the "UNIX philosophy" that try to define the latter as writing lots of independent tools that can be combined in shell scripts, are probably just trying to make sure they also can work around the GPL in the future too. That's why the gcc compiler suite doesn't provide ways for other applications to access its AST via stdout: it could be used to code completion in emacs, but also to write proprietary gcc addons that manipulate the AST and work around gcc's GPL license.
machuidel 11y ago
I've had many issues with NetworkManager, Avahi and Pulseaudio. I already decided to avoid them a long time ago. My distribution of choice, after using Slackware for several years, has always been Debian. There have been moments I tried to switch to FreeBSD and Gentoo. Since Debian decided to use Systemd I started to use Gentoo again, with the hardened profile, and avoid most of the software I do not agree with. I even created Ebuild packages for the latest MATE desktop and removed all dependencies to anything that has anything to do with GNOME 3 except GTK 3, which is optional as GTK 2 can be used as well. Somewhere along the line a kind of "takeover" happened. I am not going to say that the people doing this are "evil" or something as they at least contributed something that can be used for free. Difficult to argue with that. But I cannot stop myself having the feeling that there is some hidden agenda of interests behind it as well. For me this "takeover" looks similar to what happened to W3C where certain people (companies?) started to ignore them and created HTML5 instead. I really like the well-formness of XHTML where XML itself is very strict and has many built-in features which are still missing inside what replaced them in popularity, like JSON. The people of W3C knew what they were doing and strived for every change to be stable and future proof which can be a slow process. Too slow for some people it seems. Of course I tried to use Systemd and was really happy with it till the moment it started crashing and taking some clusters down with it. I migrated 2 servers to the new Debian and everything went well. Even the LXC containers started just fine until I started to upgrade the containers to the new Debian as well. At that time I did not even know the author of Systemd was the same as the one that started Pulseaudio, but somehow these issues gave me the same feeling of uncertainty that reminded me of it. For the servers I am now using Gentoo (as almost every other distro already switched to systemd) in combination with OpenRC without any issues. Compilation of source packages happens on a separate server where I can test them before deploying the binary packages I just build to the test and production servers.

pdkl95 11y ago

Well said. It's too bad some people seem to believe down-voting the truth will make their cognitive dissonance go away. > They're wrapping themselves in the GPL ...while encouraging a development style that isolates processes so they use IPC when they should be simply linking to a library and making a function call. Systemd depends heavily on dbus, because it ties developers into this model. This enables a rather convenient way for freeloading propriety software to use GPL code, without having to be subject to the requirements of GPL code. If you get some package to provide their services over dbus, you only have to "use" the software instead of linking against a library. Even ignoring systemd's bad design that tightly couples together services that worked fine as separate specs for decades, and even ignoring the terrible "we don't give a crap if we break your environment for no reason" attitude that is common among systemd's authors, this end-run around the GPL is a very good reason to avoid systemd. Now, I'm sure some people in this thread think I'm making crap up, being paranoid, or similar. To those people I say: when are you going to start paying attention? This is obvious when you look at the Linux community over the last 20 years. Stop being distracted by technical features instead of investing in your future. Are you going to be happy when all distros are de facto variants of Red Hat? Some of you might be, but if you're going to ignore the vast majority of Linux and Unix, could you at least fork the project instead of dragging the rest of the community down with you?\

the_why_of_y 11y ago
So let me get this straight - you are arguing simultaneously that systemd's DBus APIs should be library calls, and that systemd should be less tightly coupled? Please tell me this is a parody?
- e12e 11y ago
  You're aware there are a number of different libc-implementations one can choose from, right?
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    in case he/she isn't, I'll just mention musl and uClibc.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  I love that you ignored the point of his argument: that systemd is an end-run around the GPL, in order to make it more accessible for proprietary malware.
jhkjhk 11y ago
But BSD init is more horrible in this regard: by using shell script, it is easy to incorporate proprietary code into an otherwise copyleft product. The proponents of the "UNIX philosophy" that try to define the latter as writing lots of independent tools that can be combined in shell scripts, are probably just trying to make sure they also can work around the GPL in the future too. That's why the gcc compiler suite doesn't provide ways for other applications to access its AST via stdout: it could be used to code completion in emacs, but also to write proprietary gcc addons that manipulate the AST and work around gcc's GPL license.

machuidel 11y ago

I've had many issues with NetworkManager, Avahi and Pulseaudio. I already decided to avoid them a long time ago. My distribution of choice, after using Slackware for several years, has always been Debian. There have been moments I tried to switch to FreeBSD and Gentoo. Since Debian decided to use Systemd I started to use Gentoo again, with the hardened profile, and avoid most of the software I do not agree with. I even created Ebuild packages for the latest MATE desktop and removed all dependencies to anything that has anything to do with GNOME 3 except GTK 3, which is optional as GTK 2 can be used as well. Somewhere along the line a kind of "takeover" happened. I am not going to say that the people doing this are "evil" or something as they at least contributed something that can be used for free. Difficult to argue with that. But I cannot stop myself having the feeling that there is some hidden agenda of interests behind it as well. For me this "takeover" looks similar to what happened to W3C where certain people (companies?) started to ignore them and created HTML5 instead. I really like the well-formness of XHTML where XML itself is very strict and has many built-in features which are still missing inside what replaced them in popularity, like JSON. The people of W3C knew what they were doing and strived for every change to be stable and future proof which can be a slow process. Too slow for some people it seems. Of course I tried to use Systemd and was really happy with it till the moment it started crashing and taking some clusters down with it. I migrated 2 servers to the new Debian and everything went well. Even the LXC containers started just fine until I started to upgrade the containers to the new Debian as well. At that time I did not even know the author of Systemd was the same as the one that started Pulseaudio, but somehow these issues gave me the same feeling of uncertainty that reminded me of it. For the servers I am now using Gentoo (as almost every other distro already switched to systemd) in combination with OpenRC without any issues. Compilation of source packages happens on a separate server where I can test them before deploying the binary packages I just build to the test and production servers.