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I'm confused. What about containers makes them inherently less free than other tech? Ultimately, they're "just" a layered filesystem with some OS-level isolatio

I'm confused. What about containers makes them inherently less free than other tech? Ultimately, they're "just" a layered filesystem with some OS-level isolation magic sprinkled on top, they're not really revolutionary in any meaningful way other than that they unified two pre-existing technologies. LXC/OCI are great specifically because they give you a reasonable scaffolding upon which to build your containers, but you get to define every last thing that goes into them. Example: I used to work at a place that, for a variety of reasons, needed to use custom builds of upstream Debian packages. So, we created our own Debian container base and rebuilt all the major Docker container "base" images (e.g. `openjdk`, `python`, `node`, `nginx`) with our own image as base. We had custom control all the way down to the OS level, and our orchestration solution (Kubernetes in our case, but a pile of shell scripts calling LXC directly works too). I totally get being skeptical of {Docker|Kubernetes|Mesos|GKE|EKS|AKS}, but there's nothing inherently "un-free" about containers. They're a nice packaging primitive that happen to have some (useful, but not mission-critical) security features bundled in. So, your whole point kinda confuses me. That containers are standardized by OCI/LXC just makes them easier on your poor sysadmins to administer than 100 engineers' pet servers each running a different version of Emacs.

xte 8y ago
Not unfree by itself but as a model: free software are born to be as integrated, flexible, easy to evolve as possible, isolation means or that you can't properly integrate your software or you can't trust it. Think about the level of integration of Emacs and it's flexibility vs Eclipse/VSc/... the former is completely integrated and you can essentially modify any aspect at runtime with a simple sexp/config change. While the letter require to write and maintain plugins. The burden between programming and using in Emacs is substantially nonexistent, while you feel it on any modern software. I do not know if it's clear seeing my bad English but I hope so. Think another example, Xerox model Alto&other Smalltalk machines, freedom it's not only the code but the way you use and customize your system, it's simplicity and flexibility. In FOSS we are all a bit devs, a bit admin, a bit users, a bit ..., while in proprietary world anything is rigid compartmentalized and "switch" between compartments it's not easy. The very same concept apply to containerization of software.

xte 8y ago

Not unfree by itself but as a model: free software are born to be as integrated, flexible, easy to evolve as possible, isolation means or that you can't properly integrate your software or you can't trust it. Think about the level of integration of Emacs and it's flexibility vs Eclipse/VSc/... the former is completely integrated and you can essentially modify any aspect at runtime with a simple sexp/config change. While the letter require to write and maintain plugins. The burden between programming and using in Emacs is substantially nonexistent, while you feel it on any modern software. I do not know if it's clear seeing my bad English but I hope so. Think another example, Xerox model Alto&other Smalltalk machines, freedom it's not only the code but the way you use and customize your system, it's simplicity and flexibility. In FOSS we are all a bit devs, a bit admin, a bit users, a bit ..., while in proprietary world anything is rigid compartmentalized and "switch" between compartments it's not easy. The very same concept apply to containerization of software.