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They keep spending effort/money on projects competing with something Red Hat's doing, then getting trounced by Red Hat—sometimes politically, sometimes technica
by spanhandler 6y ago
They keep spending effort/money on projects competing with something Red Hat's doing, then getting trounced by Red Hat—sometimes politically, sometimes technically, sometimes both—but continuing to spend effort/money long after it's clear they've lost. I have to imagine that's a big drag on them.
- acoard 6y agoCan you list some examples? The more the better. Much appreciated.
- gjsman-1000 6y agoRed Hat: Hires Alex to work on Flatpak. Loved by Community, almost a dozen distros supporting Flatpak as a next-gen package format by default. Snap: Loved only by Canonical devotees. Zero distros supporting Snap exclusively by default. Red Hat: SystemD Canonical: Upstart, dead to SystemD. Red Hat & Others: Wayland Canonical: Mir. Dead to Wayland. Red Hat & Others: GNOME 3 Canonical: Unity1-7. Dead to GNOME.
- abrowne 6y agoRed Hat did use upstart before adopting systemd FWIW.
- gravitas 6y ago> Red Hat did use upstart before adopting systemd FWIW RHEL added support for Upstart as a hybrid with SysV, however it was never heavily used and not by most of their own packaged RPMs. Spin up a CentOS 6 server, install a bunch of daemons then go compare /etc/init/ to /etc/rc.d/init.d/.
- xav0989 6y agoBut the init system was Upstart. Upstart, like SystemD, can start daemons from SysV scripts. At the time, the majority of distros still used SysV or SysV-like init systems. As long as the newer systems had backwards compatibility with the SysV scripts and the newer functionality were not needed, why would upstream switch to the new format? SystemD has managed to gain near-ubiquitous usage, to the point where plenty of upstreams now only ship systemd unit files, but I would argue that this change was first initiated by the introduction and adoption of Upstart in both Ubuntu and RH.
- Conan_Kudo 6y agoWe tried to use Upstart properly in Fedora. We spent three Fedora releases trying to do that (Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Fedora 11, and Fedora 12). We gave up by Fedora 13.
- ppseafield 6y agoUpstart existed before systemd. I used to think it was NIH syndrome, but its initial release was in 2006, whereas systemd's was in 2010.
- gjsman-1000 6y agoIt's not just a release date issue. It matters (to me, at least) that Canonical was doing it's thing, RH invents something shortly after that trounces Canonical, Canonical makes futile attempts to save the ship before finally dumping the project. For example, Upstart. RH invents SystemD, Canonical stays with Upstart until, like, 2017 before giving up.
- ppseafield 6y agosystemd's widespread adoption was somewhat controversial and took years. I realize Upstart didn't receive widespread adoption, and Canonical has historically liked to start its own products (Mir and Unity as you noted). But the discussion around systemd was not "everyone except Canonical thinks it's good", and Upstart had been in development for several years.
- xav0989 6y agoWasn't it Canonical creates Upstart, switches Ubuntu to it, RH switches to it; a few years later, RH creates SystemD, RH switches to it, Ubuntu switches to it?
- stubish 6y agoUbuntu didn't switch to systemd. Debian switched to systemd, and Ubuntu had to follow or pretty much drop Debian as its upstream.
- account42 6y agoNah, they could have maintined Upstart integration like they did before. The number of packages that need init system integration is tiny compared to the whole of Debian.
- curt15 6y agoChromeOS still uses upstart.
- Conan_Kudo 6y agoThere is work going on to port Chrome OS to systemd: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=583671 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=583671