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> 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

> 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).
  - bunderbunder 7y ago
    I realize I'm picking a nit, but I think that, in this situation, it reflects a distinction that's worth making: Systemd and Docker do entrench the monoculture, but they can only have that effect because the monoculture is already so well-established. If this were EEE, they'd be part of the transition to the third E.
JohnFen 7y ago
I've decided to migrate my Linux boxen to BSD (this is a long-haul project that will take me a year or more, I estimate). In part because systemD itself really made me aware of the issue that you're raising.
- snazz 7y ago
  Which BSD, may I ask? I’d personally recommend OpenBSD, for code quality and “it just works”, but there’s a lot of really interesting BSDs that are even more obscure (Dragonfly, Debian and Gentoo using BSD kernels, etc) aside from FreeBSD and NetBSD.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  It's worth watching this[1] talk about systemd by a FreeBSD person, of all people. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

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).
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  I realize I'm picking a nit, but I think that, in this situation, it reflects a distinction that's worth making: Systemd and Docker do entrench the monoculture, but they can only have that effect because the monoculture is already so well-established. If this were EEE, they'd be part of the transition to the third E.

JohnFen 7y ago

I've decided to migrate my Linux boxen to BSD (this is a long-haul project that will take me a year or more, I estimate). In part because systemD itself really made me aware of the issue that you're raising.

snazz 7y ago
Which BSD, may I ask? I’d personally recommend OpenBSD, for code quality and “it just works”, but there’s a lot of really interesting BSDs that are even more obscure (Dragonfly, Debian and Gentoo using BSD kernels, etc) aside from FreeBSD and NetBSD.
AsyncAwait 7y ago
It's worth watching this[1] talk about systemd by a FreeBSD person, of all people. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo