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Systemd Creator Lands at Microsoft
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoAm I the only one who finds that weird that the author of this piece purportedly a journalist relies on twitter and rumours rather than you know email or call Pottering to ask him what he is doing? Is Phoronix supposed to be taken seriously?
- jeshin 4y agoWell the article does state: >At first I thought they were jokes or just snarky remarks, but after a day of following up with folks, it actually turns out not to be a joke. So who's to say he didn't? Twitter seems just to be where he first heard it
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoI mean why is he following up with folks? It’s not like it’s extremely hard to get in touch with Poettering.
- zaphirplane 4y agoHis redhat email returns out of office err OOF
- bayindirh 4y agoFrom my observations, Poettering is not a person who kindly answers his e-mails.
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoYour observation strongly differs from mine then. Poettering has always been fairly reachable and is easy to communicate with. That might have changed following the torrent of abuse a minority of the Linux community threw at him. I hope it’s not the case.
- bayindirh 4y agoI really would love to be proven wrong to be honest.
- the_biot 4y agoFrankly no. I don't mean to denigrate, but Phoronix is generally not seen as all that great a source of good journalism. He did say he at least tried to confirm this news however.
- zokula 4y ago
- shrubble 4y agoRick Belluzzo part deux.
- rvz 4y agoLooks like a tactical 'Embrace'. On top of that, surveillance capitalism is winning over the free software / open source developers as companies like Microsoft are buying out / hiring the majority of them. The free-software activists from the FSF and other free-software supporters have lost to the tech bros at these big tech companies that have hijacked 'open-source' and ran with it. They have failed in their mission to stop all this closed-source software from spreading. It looks like it is here to stay; especially with the help of former free software developers. I guess if you can’t beat them, join them.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- grepfru_it 4y agoThey pay you $500k/yr and up. Your open source project pays $50 on a good month. You have a house to maintain and family to feed. Why would you turn down such an offer? One thing I will caution those who do take the offer, the company will use you until you are no longer necessary and then throw you out (extinguish)
- hcrean 4y agoIf you are in FOSS for the money, you are not in FOSS. Humanity could be sat around eating fruit and making art, instead we have mortgages and credit scores, because the venal systems corrupt and extortionate the progressive ones.
- caramelcustard 4y agoWe have mortgages and credit scores because the aformentioned humanity more often than not lacks the responsibility to assess both the financial capabilities of those who borrow the money and the evaluation capabilities of those who lend.
- hcrean 4y agoThis is a late stage cause. There are also many early stage causes.
- claudiojulio 4y ago
- EdwardDiego 4y agoProbably Red Hat, where he spent 15 years writing shit millions of people use for free. Christ almighty.
- hulitu 4y agoPoliticians also ruin countries for a lot of time before returning to mothership (lobby companies).
- EdwardDiego 4y agoSo you think he ruined Linux? What does that imply about all the distro devs that chose to incorporate things he worked on? It must be a heavy burden to be so much smarter than all of them.
- hulitu 4y agoOSS is about choice. That's why i choose not to use such a distro.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoWhich is exactly how it works. Not sure about the casting aspersions bit though.
- rasz 4y agoElop did 4 years at Nokia, but he was much better at his job.
- slategruen 4y agoWhat a surprise
- yellowapple 4y agoNever thought all those "systemd is turning Linux into Windows" jokes would age like wine, yet here we are.
- curiousgal 4y ago> age like wine No pun intended?
- yellowapple 4y agoOn that note, Wine, too, has aged like wine :)
- krylon 4y agoOh, I hope that was intented! ;)
- jeshin 4y agoAgent Poettering, welcome back. You've done tremendous work for us. *I actually don't care strongly about systemd one way or the other but couldn't resist the joke
- em-bee 4y agodouble agent poettering. you are to remain quiet in your new position until you receive the call to activate.
- yakak 4y agoDue to an unforseen DBUS on WSL bug, we never were able to activate our double agent.
- wooque 4y agoI don't know why the hate, both systemd and Pulseaudio are great, at least better than what was before them and improved Linux desktop quite a bit.
- bayindirh 4y agoPulseaudio created a lot of pain when it first arrived, since it had a ton of teething problems. It doesn't have logical defaults even today. However, Pipewire just worked without any problems and smoothly the day it landed.
- 4y ago
- caramelcustard 4y ago"...now confirmed from additional sources that Lennart Poettering did indeed quietly depart Red Hat earlier this year for another employment opportunity." Can't we just wait for any official info?
- elros 4y agoHahaha, he's your problem now!! Just kidding, I hope everything goes well for him and I've really enjoyed following his work and reading his blog throughout the years.
- whateveracct 4y agoAs a NixOS user, I love systemd
- lillecarl 4y agoYes! Even when not on NixOS I like systemd, one reasonable(not perfect) way to do things? Sign me up!
- herewulf 4y agoI'm interested in NixOS but it only supports systemd. Seriously, init systems like OpenRC do one thing and do it well. Where have I heard that before?
- UniqueUsername0 4y agoNixOS doesn't follow the UNIX philosophy in many ways, especially when it comes to systemd. If you want NixOS you will have to use systemd and embrace it. Otherwise you can go the Guix route and try to make the most out of the much inferior ecosystem.
- forgotpwd16 4y agoOfficially yes. Unofficially there're have been attempts to support other init systems, e.g. https://sr.ht/~guido/nixos-init-freedom/ https://sr.ht/~guido/nixos-init-freedom/ (s6), https://github.com/svanderburg/nix-processmgmt https://github.com/svanderburg/nix-processmgmt (abstract; allows a few inits).
- whateveracct 4y agoNixOS does systemd right: - systemd gives the use a unified API for working with services. The journal etc. - Nix gives the programmer a nice way to define systemd units. If you hate systemd due to normal Linux..NixOS might change your mind.
- boxmonster 4y agoThe snobby attitude about Microsoft on HN makes no sense to me
- ornornor 4y agoThey’ve worked very very hard in the past to extinguish and annihilate a lot of the values HN stands for. Either you’re too young or didn’t follow tech back then but MS and Gates truly did evil moves to try and kill any and all competition, especially Linux and open source. Many of us remember.
- vintermann 4y agoThat was the bad old days. Things got better under Nadella. Just like they got steadily more evil at Google. There are no big corporations you can trust in the long term, but at least MS is behaving reasonably well right now.
- jacquesm 4y agoThings look better under Nadella. But they really aren't that much better.
- archerx 4y ago> Things got better under Nadella - Windows is now a dumpster fire - Azure is a mess - surface computers suck + much more I feel like our definitions of “better” are very different
- vintermann 4y agoWell, yes. I'm talking about corporate trash antics like getting one of your insiders to wreck a competitor so you can buy out the scraps (Elop and Nokia), or using a proxy lawsuit to try to strangle the open opposition (SCO vs IBM). I'm not judging what's best on a technical level. No amount of hypothetical technical goodness can make up for Ballmer.
- 4y ago
- noobermin 4y agoIt really is very hard not to make jokes about this.
- oynqr 4y agoHey, he'll feel right at home with Powershell and the absurdly long verbs it uses.
- lillecarl 4y agoYou know that they can be shortened right? Get-ChildItem = gci I for one really like PowerShell, if it could consume bash completions I would switch to using it as my $SHELL. Right now I'm leaning to switch from ZSH to Xonsh (Python). Reason for liking PowerShell: C# compability, OOP, semi-sane syntax. You can do type definitions, serde multiple formats into native structures.
- vips7L 4y agoAnyone who criticizes pwsh’s verbosity has never actually used it. It comes with great aliases by default and fuzzy matches switches to shorten them. I don’t use many tools outside cmdlets or pwsh built-ins, but have you turned on history completions and menu complete? I find that I don’t need completions for external commands since history complete will just remember what I did last time.
- em-bee 4y agoi am not surprised that he made this move quietly. poettering's work attracted a disproportionate share of criticism, and moving to microsoft is not exactly a helpful move to quell that criticism. on the contrary, it will only get worse. since he continues to work on systemd, critics will now start to decry systemd as being a microsoft product, or at least strongly influenced by microsoft. so this move is likely to strengthen the anti systemd camp. we'll see what comes from that.
- bayindirh 4y agoAs a person who doesn't like systemd a lot (yet doesn't hate it either), I find some of the criticisms well founded. I've written them in the past, so I'll not re-iterate these walls of text, but all in all, systemd had to learn some things over and over just because it disregarded people's warnings about the problems some of these design patterns create. Being a little agreeable and open to discourse is not a bad thing. All in all, systemd makes different trade-offs w.r.t. design, and is not radically fast when compared to what's coming before that. Capability wise it made some things easier (not possible), and some things way more harder. It's just another iteration. Hope he doesn't pulls another "De Icaza", and all goes well for him. OTOH, I can't trust neither him, nor Microsoft, because I look actions rather than words. Let's see.
- mariusor 4y agoWhat does "quietly" mean to you? It would be an exercise in conceit to broadcast such a move on social media with the assumption that people are interested, wouldn't it?
- em-bee 4y agowell, that's the question. how would such an announcement have been received? i expect the response would not have been much different really, so the only difference is that the response happens several months after the move, which now makes it a fait accompli. trying to put myself into poetterings shoes the difference to me would mean that, if questioned, i could talk more confidently about why i made the move, pointing at how it affected my work, instead of speculating about it. it would also give me time to acclimate myself to the new situation. so keeping the move quiet simply makes it easier to deal with any negative responses.
- carlsborg 4y agoThe world needs a better way to monetize open source.
- bayindirh 4y agoRedHat showed the way. GitLab showed the way. Source Hut is showing the way. There are other examples for sure.
- pxc 4y agoDon't Red Hat and GitLab have really different models, since Red Hat only releases free software and GitLab is merely 'open core'?
- bayindirh 4y agoYes, they tread different paths. RedHat sells support (RedHat Enterprise Linux), develops enterprise ready software and gives unbranded, not supported versions to the community to play with and use it. GitLab sells SaaS, provides a free self-installable community supported version, and accepts contributions from community. They're pivoting to a more closed model, which I don't like, but it's still possible to get the community version, the code and play with it. All in all I think many possible different ways to monetize an free and open source project. They work differently than we get used to over the last century, but it's possible.
- marssaxman 4y agoMore than that, the world needs a basic income system, so that people who feel thus motivated can write open source code^ without having to worry about monetization. ^: or raise children, make art, tend to community organizations, and any number of other socially beneficial activities for which a profit motive would be irrelevant or detrimental
- pxc 4y agoIt'd be nice if Microsoft finally incorporated systemd support into WSL in a first-class way. At the moment, if you want to run a distro with its normal init system and service manager, you have to run the whole thing inside a user namespace so that systemd can be PID 1.
- atoav 4y agoAs someone who thinks PulseAudio is conceptually flawed, I don't really get the way old linuxers hate on systemd. I mean ok, from a user perspective certain common things in systemd could have been friendlier, but I always got the things I needed to work and it is clearly a powerful system. While I don't really like the way Poettering handles projects, I think nobody who does open source software deserves that kind of hatered for a piece of software they have written. Usually if you don't like a piece of software, you just don't use it. And this is the core of the problem: If I got the critics correctly the problem has more to do with the way this has been "forced" onto the community. Most criticism on the substance has been just bias colored by this aspect or people being like "I was used to the old system, now I need to learn something new". The latter is of course a totally valid point. If you want people to change their habits, you need to give them a clear reason why and — more important — they need to want to change that habit themselves. The same greybeard friend of mine who still complains on systemd happily adopted pipewire. Why? Because he saw a clear benefit in doing so and nobody forced this onto him. Critica might argue Pöttering now going to Microsoft is proof that he always has been the devil, I'd argue it is proof that a certain kind of culture can drive people out of open source. I could imagine a different kind of universe in which the communications between the systemd devs and the rest of the community had been different and we would not only have gotten a better systemd, but maybe also a Pöttering who would not go to MS. The saddest thing about the whole affair is that it has a stifeling effect on new devs. Who would dare to write another systemd after that? Certainly not me.
- bayindirh 4y agoThe issue not being forced only. It's how valid criticisms are just tossed out of the window and systemd is developed as is because "the lead developer and the team knew way better than the collection wisdom accumulated over the years". Funny thing is they have bitten by the bugs they claimed they're immune to, so they had to apply these principles like they're first adopters of these. I've voiced my criticisms over the years, yet I still use systemd. I don't like it, but I don't hate it either. I want to share them, but, It'll be long, so I'll just leave links to my own comments: 1- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27651567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27651567 - A general criticism comment. 2- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616356 - A general criticism thread. 3- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672248 - About bugs in systemd. At the end of the day, if a critical component of an OS is being replaced, people at least want their concerns addressed. Want to have some conversation. Being yelled at literally and proverbially as forcing adoption of said software is bound to create some backlash. *Edit:* Initial text contained in this reply misunderstood the parent. Corrected, clarified, softened and re-written. Sorry about that.
- kasabali 4y agoSay what you want about Microsoft, but the thing is they look after their people. See Miguel de Icaza for a previous example.
- devonallie 4y agoAt long last I can finally get the Office suite as a .service!
- mtbkvc 4y agoI am not surprised that much by this news. Red Hat paid him well, and there are not a lot of companies that would offer more for the kind of job he does. I am sure this feels like a step forward from his perspective. He will still be able to do what he wants, work on something interesting, and continue to trigger the Linux community.
- mariusor 4y agoIf this is true, it's more than likely that Poettering would join Microsoft only if his work was focused on systemd, or something similarly interesting and low level. I for one, will be glad that a company is willing to pay for such work, even if it's them.
- plaguepilled 4y agoOh god I can already see the edgy YouTube thumbnails for videos covering this
- tannhaeuser 4y agoGreat, can the Linux heads now finally excise all of systemd along with it's monstrous scope creep, .ini files, binary journals from Linux, or will they continue to find excuses for their tastelessness and corporate slavedom?