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I get no end of bemusement from open source advocates that think it makes any kind of rational sense to campaign against an open source project. THIS IS ALL OPE

I get no end of bemusement from open source advocates that think it makes any kind of rational sense to campaign against an open source project. THIS IS ALL OPEN SOURCE. Freedom and choice is the whole point, isn't it? If you prefer an alternative or forebear to systemd, that is great. Use it. Advocate for the system you prefer. Convince people that the choice you have made is better. Meanwhile the vast majority of distributions have voluntarily chosen systemd. Perhaps if its critics reflect on the reality of that shift, they could look at ways to improve the alternative to address its perceived deficiencies—just as GCC started doing now that LLVM has taken a bite out of their dominance.

enriquto 7y ago
Notice that nobody complains about the existence of systemd, but about the enormous and shady pressures that distros had (particulary debian) to adopt it as standard. Nowadays, the complain is mostly about the systemd monoculture.
- choeger 7y ago
  In fact many people did complain about the existence - I have read actual demands that distros should actively work against it back in the days. Also the personal attacks against Lennart make it difficult to see any rational point in the whole debate.
- sjwright 7y ago
  How is systemd any more of a monoculture than the Linux kernel itself? In principle they are more alike than you might care to admit.
  - vpzom 7y ago
    That's a problem too, but existence of other problems doesn't excuse this one
    - sjwright 7y ago
      There's a definite [citation needed] on the assertion that integrating tasks into one project/process == monoculture. And a [citation needed] that systemd is large enough to warrant being called a monoculture in the first place—and to flip the coin, that GNU init is small enough to not be a monoculture. Let's not forget a huge [citation needed] that the addition of another alternative into the marketplace of ideas could ever be described as monoculture. And while we're at it, how about a big juicy [citation needed] that a monoculture is a bad thing anyway, in this instance?
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  > systemd monoculture As someone who really wanted the BSDs to get more credit ~20 years back, and spent a fair amount of time on various commercial Unixes as well, I find that phrase rather amusing. Historically poor standardization of the userland aside, GNU/Linux is the poster child for monoculture in Unix, and has left a whole lot of dead or dying software in its wake.
  - h2odragon 7y ago
    We lost ownership of our systems. No one wants a BOFH built and maintained IT system no matter how wonderful it is at actually meeting business needs, because BOFHs aint interchangeable and business built on individuals aint a thing anymore. So open source is full of apparent forced goupthink and all or nothing half solutions, at least in the corporate world. There's home and hobby and personal business systems that are really slick using the lesser known packages and things like "I forked this BSD kernel years ago and twiddled it since". We hear about them sometimes in news stories about "Airport HVAC system found to have been running on C64 for 19 years." Perhaps it inaccurate to say its 'dead or dying' software, until it's no longer appropriate for those use cases where we never even notice its still running.
  - bunderbunder 7y ago
    Just to pile it on, I think it's becoming something of a viral force for monoculture, too. 20 years ago, I might occasionally reboot to Windows or fire up a Windows virtual machine in order to open up the occasional recalcitrant Word document in Word itself. Nowadays, if I'm not running Linux on the metal, then I need to keep some sort of a Linux virtual machine running constantly, because so much software has a hard dependency on either the GNU userland or a Linux kernel feature such as LXC. This is worrisome to me, because, while GNU/Linux is FOSS, "free and open source" doesn't actually mean "unfettered". A small number of large corporations such as IBM and Google have an outsize amount of influence. Doubly so now that IBM owns Red Hat. And, as the whole GNOME/systemd thing demonstrates, even the non-corporate entities have a lot of opportunity and incentive to engage in rent-seeking behavior now that things have been whittled down to such a tight software monoculture. They'd presumably not have even attempted such a thing as taking a hard dependency on systemd if maintaining decent compatibility with FreeBSD (or any other OS) were still a relevant priority.
lmm 7y ago
Open standards are more important than open source. Choice is indeed the whole point, but systemd is designed to take my choice away. It doesn't matter how good an init system I make, if it starts getting any traction then systemd will come up with a new incompatible API for doing something, Gnome will take a hard dependency on that API, and distributions won't be able to ship my init system. It's worth realising that the GNU project could never have happened in the first place - Linux could never have been a thing - if historical Unix had been designed like systemd.
- sjwright 7y ago
  None of that makes any sense to me. It's all open source. It's laughable to worry about Gnome taking a hard dependency on an API when hundreds of software programs take a hard dependency on Gnome. Hypocrisy, much? Meanwhile if the maintainers of GNOME betray your trust, it sounds like you should hate this hypothetical GNOME for the same reasons you apparently hate systemd. Or rather than hating it, you could just fork it. If enough people agree with you, a disentangled fork will inevitably be maintained. Hell, people maintain forks of GNOME for BSD—and that's even more impressive since there is no open source monoculture more monolithic than the Linux kernel API dependency. You could quite possibly be right that the open source movement couldn't have have started with the design principles of systemd[0] but it's naive to assume that what was good for open source in its infancy is still what's best for open source in its coming maturity. [0] Given that the open source movement has monumentally benefited from monolithic design principles in the form of the Linux kernel, I think that hypothesis is demonstrably absurd and easily rejected.
  - lmm 7y ago
    > If the maintainers of GNOME betray your trust, it sounds like you should hate this hypothetical GNOME for the same reasons you apparently hate systemd. Or just fork it. If enough people agree with you, a disentangled fork will inevitably be maintained. And then they move on to the next project and introduce a hard-dependency on systemd there. RedHat has more programmers than me, they're always going to be able to add systemd dependencies faster than I can fork things. The only way users will ever be able to have a choice of init system is if the community can agree that hard-depending on systemd is indeed a betrayal, and publicise this. > it's naive to assume that what was good for open source in its infancy is still what's best for open source in its coming maturity. Open source succeeded because it was easy to improve and replace things piecemeal. That's still as important as ever. > [0] Given that the open source movement has monumentally benefited from monolithic design principles in the form of the Linux kernel, I think that hypothesis is demonstrably absurd and easily rejected. Linux has suffered from its monolithic approach to kernel-space development, but the damage was mitigated by an extreme commitment to providing a solid API to userspace that never gets broken. So most progress took place in userspace and wasn't affected. There's no analogous boundary for systemd.
darkpuma 7y ago
You are presuming that everyone gives a damn about open source as an end unto itself, not merely a means to an end. Ironically, the people who do consider it an end unto itself are probably the people most likely to despise the term "open source" and prefer "Free Software". Ask RMS what he thinks about SystemD and I bet you he'll shrug and say it's fine because it's Free, and that's all he really cares about. Needless to say, most people have a greater diversity of concerns.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Trust me, I don't give a damn about open source as an end in itself—to me RMS means root mean square first, Roads and Maritime Services second, and occasionally I might be reminded of an unwashed beard.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    > "Trust me, I don't give a damn about open source as a means to an end" See, I think that's where you differ from most people. To most people, I believe open source is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. What they want first and foremost is something that works, and it happens to be the case that having the source code freely available facilitates having something that works and gives them a sense of comfort, an assurance, that it will continue to work in the foreseeable future. So appealing to "it's opensource, so you should like it" totally misses the mark. The argument should be "it works, therefore you should like it." Had SystemD never given anybody any trouble, I don't think it would be hated. I think SystemD is hated because (particularly during early adoption years) there were a lot of things about it that didn't work for a lot of people. This made them angry, because it violated what they actually cared about. Not permissive licensing, but rather having something that works. The principle of open source is not axiomatic to most people; it only has value when it is part of having something that works. Somewhere else I see this mentality: Android. There are a few among the 'community' who would have me pop open the champagne because "Linux won" on account of Android being an incredible commercial success. But why should I celebrate that? Why is "number of CPUs running Linux" the metric I should be glued to? Because Linux is open source? So what? Honestly, who gives a damn?
craigsmansion 7y ago
It's not SystemD itself that's the problem; it's just technically terrible, but, as you say, it's open source. A lot of open source software is terrible but popular. It's Debian violating their social contract that was the problem for me. What the vast majority of distributions do is irrelevant, a lot of them are chasing popularity or have a proprietary interest in having a "unified platform", but I had come to expect better from Debian. There is really no longer a "reality of that shift" to reflect on, since the SystemD problem has been more or less fixed: there are now debian-based distributions to upgrade to. If other people want to run that dumpsterfire of cowboycode on their computers, that's fine by me.
- the_why_of_y 7y ago
  > It's Debian violating their social contract that was the problem for me. Which clause of the social contract did Debian violate? https://www.debian.org/social_contract https://www.debian.org/social_contract
  - craigsmansion 7y ago
    "Our priorities are our users and free software" Debian ranked SystemD adoption over their users, since it broke users' computers, even though there were viable alternatives available that would have not broken these systems. I still like Debian, but I'm not letting them (directly) near my systems again.
    - the_why_of_y 7y ago
      "Breaking user's computers" sounds like a bug of severity "critical", which would block the release. Can you point me to your bug report?

enriquto 7y ago

Notice that nobody complains about the existence of systemd, but about the enormous and shady pressures that distros had (particulary debian) to adopt it as standard. Nowadays, the complain is mostly about the systemd monoculture.

choeger 7y ago
In fact many people did complain about the existence - I have read actual demands that distros should actively work against it back in the days. Also the personal attacks against Lennart make it difficult to see any rational point in the whole debate.
sjwright 7y ago
How is systemd any more of a monoculture than the Linux kernel itself? In principle they are more alike than you might care to admit.
- vpzom 7y ago
  That's a problem too, but existence of other problems doesn't excuse this one
  - sjwright 7y ago
    There's a definite [citation needed] on the assertion that integrating tasks into one project/process == monoculture. And a [citation needed] that systemd is large enough to warrant being called a monoculture in the first place—and to flip the coin, that GNU init is small enough to not be a monoculture. Let's not forget a huge [citation needed] that the addition of another alternative into the marketplace of ideas could ever be described as monoculture. And while we're at it, how about a big juicy [citation needed] that a monoculture is a bad thing anyway, in this instance?
bunderbunder 7y ago
> systemd monoculture As someone who really wanted the BSDs to get more credit ~20 years back, and spent a fair amount of time on various commercial Unixes as well, I find that phrase rather amusing. Historically poor standardization of the userland aside, GNU/Linux is the poster child for monoculture in Unix, and has left a whole lot of dead or dying software in its wake.
- h2odragon 7y ago
  We lost ownership of our systems. No one wants a BOFH built and maintained IT system no matter how wonderful it is at actually meeting business needs, because BOFHs aint interchangeable and business built on individuals aint a thing anymore. So open source is full of apparent forced goupthink and all or nothing half solutions, at least in the corporate world. There's home and hobby and personal business systems that are really slick using the lesser known packages and things like "I forked this BSD kernel years ago and twiddled it since". We hear about them sometimes in news stories about "Airport HVAC system found to have been running on C64 for 19 years." Perhaps it inaccurate to say its 'dead or dying' software, until it's no longer appropriate for those use cases where we never even notice its still running.
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  Just to pile it on, I think it's becoming something of a viral force for monoculture, too. 20 years ago, I might occasionally reboot to Windows or fire up a Windows virtual machine in order to open up the occasional recalcitrant Word document in Word itself. Nowadays, if I'm not running Linux on the metal, then I need to keep some sort of a Linux virtual machine running constantly, because so much software has a hard dependency on either the GNU userland or a Linux kernel feature such as LXC. This is worrisome to me, because, while GNU/Linux is FOSS, "free and open source" doesn't actually mean "unfettered". A small number of large corporations such as IBM and Google have an outsize amount of influence. Doubly so now that IBM owns Red Hat. And, as the whole GNOME/systemd thing demonstrates, even the non-corporate entities have a lot of opportunity and incentive to engage in rent-seeking behavior now that things have been whittled down to such a tight software monoculture. They'd presumably not have even attempted such a thing as taking a hard dependency on systemd if maintaining decent compatibility with FreeBSD (or any other OS) were still a relevant priority.

lmm 7y ago

Open standards are more important than open source. Choice is indeed the whole point, but systemd is designed to take my choice away. It doesn't matter how good an init system I make, if it starts getting any traction then systemd will come up with a new incompatible API for doing something, Gnome will take a hard dependency on that API, and distributions won't be able to ship my init system. It's worth realising that the GNU project could never have happened in the first place - Linux could never have been a thing - if historical Unix had been designed like systemd.

sjwright 7y ago
None of that makes any sense to me. It's all open source. It's laughable to worry about Gnome taking a hard dependency on an API when hundreds of software programs take a hard dependency on Gnome. Hypocrisy, much? Meanwhile if the maintainers of GNOME betray your trust, it sounds like you should hate this hypothetical GNOME for the same reasons you apparently hate systemd. Or rather than hating it, you could just fork it. If enough people agree with you, a disentangled fork will inevitably be maintained. Hell, people maintain forks of GNOME for BSD—and that's even more impressive since there is no open source monoculture more monolithic than the Linux kernel API dependency. You could quite possibly be right that the open source movement couldn't have have started with the design principles of systemd[0] but it's naive to assume that what was good for open source in its infancy is still what's best for open source in its coming maturity. [0] Given that the open source movement has monumentally benefited from monolithic design principles in the form of the Linux kernel, I think that hypothesis is demonstrably absurd and easily rejected.
- lmm 7y ago
  > If the maintainers of GNOME betray your trust, it sounds like you should hate this hypothetical GNOME for the same reasons you apparently hate systemd. Or just fork it. If enough people agree with you, a disentangled fork will inevitably be maintained. And then they move on to the next project and introduce a hard-dependency on systemd there. RedHat has more programmers than me, they're always going to be able to add systemd dependencies faster than I can fork things. The only way users will ever be able to have a choice of init system is if the community can agree that hard-depending on systemd is indeed a betrayal, and publicise this. > it's naive to assume that what was good for open source in its infancy is still what's best for open source in its coming maturity. Open source succeeded because it was easy to improve and replace things piecemeal. That's still as important as ever. > [0] Given that the open source movement has monumentally benefited from monolithic design principles in the form of the Linux kernel, I think that hypothesis is demonstrably absurd and easily rejected. Linux has suffered from its monolithic approach to kernel-space development, but the damage was mitigated by an extreme commitment to providing a solid API to userspace that never gets broken. So most progress took place in userspace and wasn't affected. There's no analogous boundary for systemd.

darkpuma 7y ago

You are presuming that everyone gives a damn about open source as an end unto itself, not merely a means to an end. Ironically, the people who do consider it an end unto itself are probably the people most likely to despise the term "open source" and prefer "Free Software". Ask RMS what he thinks about SystemD and I bet you he'll shrug and say it's fine because it's Free, and that's all he really cares about. Needless to say, most people have a greater diversity of concerns.

sjwright 7y ago
Trust me, I don't give a damn about open source as an end in itself—to me RMS means root mean square first, Roads and Maritime Services second, and occasionally I might be reminded of an unwashed beard.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  > "Trust me, I don't give a damn about open source as a means to an end" See, I think that's where you differ from most people. To most people, I believe open source is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. What they want first and foremost is something that works, and it happens to be the case that having the source code freely available facilitates having something that works and gives them a sense of comfort, an assurance, that it will continue to work in the foreseeable future. So appealing to "it's opensource, so you should like it" totally misses the mark. The argument should be "it works, therefore you should like it." Had SystemD never given anybody any trouble, I don't think it would be hated. I think SystemD is hated because (particularly during early adoption years) there were a lot of things about it that didn't work for a lot of people. This made them angry, because it violated what they actually cared about. Not permissive licensing, but rather having something that works. The principle of open source is not axiomatic to most people; it only has value when it is part of having something that works. Somewhere else I see this mentality: Android. There are a few among the 'community' who would have me pop open the champagne because "Linux won" on account of Android being an incredible commercial success. But why should I celebrate that? Why is "number of CPUs running Linux" the metric I should be glued to? Because Linux is open source? So what? Honestly, who gives a damn?

craigsmansion 7y ago

It's not SystemD itself that's the problem; it's just technically terrible, but, as you say, it's open source. A lot of open source software is terrible but popular. It's Debian violating their social contract that was the problem for me. What the vast majority of distributions do is irrelevant, a lot of them are chasing popularity or have a proprietary interest in having a "unified platform", but I had come to expect better from Debian. There is really no longer a "reality of that shift" to reflect on, since the SystemD problem has been more or less fixed: there are now debian-based distributions to upgrade to. If other people want to run that dumpsterfire of cowboycode on their computers, that's fine by me.

the_why_of_y 7y ago
> It's Debian violating their social contract that was the problem for me. Which clause of the social contract did Debian violate? https://www.debian.org/social_contract https://www.debian.org/social_contract
- craigsmansion 7y ago
  "Our priorities are our users and free software" Debian ranked SystemD adoption over their users, since it broke users' computers, even though there were viable alternatives available that would have not broken these systems. I still like Debian, but I'm not letting them (directly) near my systems again.
  - the_why_of_y 7y ago
    "Breaking user's computers" sounds like a bug of severity "critical", which would block the release. Can you point me to your bug report?