6 ms·

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 sta

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.
  - aerique 7y ago
    Yes, this. And SystemD adds to this monoculture (as does Docker).
    - 7y ago

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.
- aerique 7y ago
  Yes, this. And SystemD adds to this monoculture (as does Docker).
  - 7y ago