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That is a problem. On the other hand I know more incidents caused by overfunded corporate OSS developers who have taken over projects and justify their existen

That is a problem. On the other hand I know more incidents caused by overfunded corporate OSS developers who have taken over projects and justify their existence by manically rewriting the code base for no reason. Many of these incidents are covered up. Contradicting the corporate politicians is dangerous, because often they have installed dozens of other developers who always agree with them and are ready to libel dissenters. OSS funding is a hard problem. OSS was best when it wasn't funded at all.

ricardobeat 4y ago
Your post is controversial, but hard agree on that last sentence. The environment changed completely in the past decade after the lines were blurred, and not in a good way.
cratermoon 4y ago
> Many of these incidents are covered up Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This vaguely conspiratorial comment about things "they" have done is a problem.
b112 4y ago
[flagged]
- scrollaway 4y ago
  I flagged your post because at this point, talking about systemd is just flamebait. You have an opinion about what an init system "should" be. Systemd developers have another. If you don't want systemd, don't use it. What's that, you can't "not" use it because your distribution decided to use it? There's a good reason they did. If you think you know better, use one that doesn't, or do your own distro… Systemd is also a poor example of an "overfunded" project. Some of its developers are paid, but it's not funded "as a project", it's just maintained by a company. Want an overfunded open source project? Look at React. And yet, look at how incredibly popular and useful it is. The "overfunding" goes into conferences and developer advocacy. Bad thesis, bad examples, easy to find counter examples. Money in open source can be problematic. More often than not, it's the lack thereof that is.
  - b112 4y ago
    Flagging my comment, and then wading into the discussion, should be flaggable in itself. If you disagree with my post, downvote. If you engage in what you call flamebait(it wasn't), you are therefore fanning the flames, and out of line. I do not believe your actions are in good faith here.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      I was being polite by actually telling you why you were being downvoted and flagged, rather than doing it without explaining. I didn't engage in your flamebait, I addressed the underlying side-premise that systemd might be an overfunded project.
      - b112 4y ago
        Your claim was that mentioning systemd at this point, was flamebait. (Again, you were wrong, however...) Therefore, if you engage in any discussion related to systemd, as a reply, you have waded into what you claim is flamebait! There is no escaping this logc. Hand waving, misdirection won't help here. Your actions were wrong.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  I'm not sure what rose tinted glasses you're wearing but this is certainly a take. systemd sure does a lot, but it does it drastically better than how it was done historically. It's been over a decade, this vitriol feels misdirected at this point. I cannot imagine going back to the cesspool of sysv rc-style init. What a headache. > This default is almost always the last way you want an init system to do. It should never be the default. What do you propose is a better default? If there is one, then distro maintainers are free to select it. I think the default chosen is very reasonable. > And now it thinks it should add another OOM killer, before the kernel! Talk about feature bloat! There absolutely should be another OOM killer. This strikes me as pure ignorance of dealing with OOM situations with any sort of intelligence. The problem you highlight lands squarely with the Ubuntu maintainers not configuring their desktop environment properly. They should be configuring the user session slice with looser memory pressure constraints, but generally handling OOM further down the stack is a very, very good thing. A proper desktop environment might take advantage of these controls to suspend resource-hungry applications not in the foreground. This also opens up the door to things like asking browsers to dump cache when they create memory pressure, and generally playing nicer with other applications.
  - b112 4y ago
    I'm not sure what rose tinted glasses you're wearing but this is certainly a take. Experience, maintaining 1000s of concurrent servers, VMs, for dozens of companies, over 30 years, had shown me how systemd has been a negative, not a positive. Part of the issue, as I highlighted, is feature scope. In fact, I said nothing bad about core systemd, as an init system. As I said prior, as an init system, it would have been fine without all the added bloat. But here we have it handling everything under the sun, but again.. poorly. Which leads to another issue, change. An init system is about stability, and stability is absolutely more difficult with change. Systemd should shed everything not directly init related, and spend all efforts to stabilize, and keep pace with mainline, and kernel changes. That, and nothing else. In terms of OOM, there is little point of discussion here, you're too far out in left field, too far from the admin world, to even hear me.
    - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  > Someone at redhat needs to pull 90% of the systemd team, and go into maint mode. Lennart Poettering has already left RH for working at MS.
auslegung 4y ago
> OSS funding is a hard problem. OSS was best when it wasn't funded at all. “Best” is subjective yet I don’t disagree. But what you don’t mention, which I think is important to mention here, is the proliferation of OSS that other vital, closed source software (often monetized) depends upon. OSS has always powered vital software, I’m just making the point that it’s increasingly, alarmingly common. “Alarming” because the OSS developers often feel they should be compensated if their work is monetized and/or powers other vital software. There is a license for this, but it’s difficulty and complicated to enforce. And it’s not surprising for someone to license their work as “do whatever you want with it” at first, only to change their mind later when they see it used in FAANG products. But then it’s too late, and bitterness and anger creep in. Take the anger and bitterness of a generation+ of OSS developers and you have our current predicament :(
zozbot234 4y ago
> Contradicting the corporate politicians is dangerous, because often they have installed dozens of other developers who always agree with them Or you can fork the project and ignore the politics altogether; FLOSS licenses will always protect your right to do this. Open source is a do-ocracy.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Unfortunately things have changed in a way that makes this route not viable. Forking a popular project maintained by a corporation is guaranteed failure, as people will look at github stars, number of existing users, and corporate backing itself as indicators of 'quality', while you have none.
  - oivey 4y ago
    I’m not sure that that’s worse than before. Before GitHub, your fork would probably be just as hard or if not harder to discover. The same issues would exist with credibility, too.
RobotToaster 4y ago
I feel like I agree with you, but I'm going to need some examples. The closest example I can think of is firefox seemingly getting worse every version since they removed native extensions.

ricardobeat 4y ago

Your post is controversial, but hard agree on that last sentence. The environment changed completely in the past decade after the lines were blurred, and not in a good way.

cratermoon 4y ago

> Many of these incidents are covered up Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This vaguely conspiratorial comment about things "they" have done is a problem.

b112 4y ago

[flagged]

scrollaway 4y ago
I flagged your post because at this point, talking about systemd is just flamebait. You have an opinion about what an init system "should" be. Systemd developers have another. If you don't want systemd, don't use it. What's that, you can't "not" use it because your distribution decided to use it? There's a good reason they did. If you think you know better, use one that doesn't, or do your own distro… Systemd is also a poor example of an "overfunded" project. Some of its developers are paid, but it's not funded "as a project", it's just maintained by a company. Want an overfunded open source project? Look at React. And yet, look at how incredibly popular and useful it is. The "overfunding" goes into conferences and developer advocacy. Bad thesis, bad examples, easy to find counter examples. Money in open source can be problematic. More often than not, it's the lack thereof that is.
- b112 4y ago
  Flagging my comment, and then wading into the discussion, should be flaggable in itself. If you disagree with my post, downvote. If you engage in what you call flamebait(it wasn't), you are therefore fanning the flames, and out of line. I do not believe your actions are in good faith here.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    I was being polite by actually telling you why you were being downvoted and flagged, rather than doing it without explaining. I didn't engage in your flamebait, I addressed the underlying side-premise that systemd might be an overfunded project.
    - b112 4y ago
      Your claim was that mentioning systemd at this point, was flamebait. (Again, you were wrong, however...) Therefore, if you engage in any discussion related to systemd, as a reply, you have waded into what you claim is flamebait! There is no escaping this logc. Hand waving, misdirection won't help here. Your actions were wrong.
xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
I'm not sure what rose tinted glasses you're wearing but this is certainly a take. systemd sure does a lot, but it does it drastically better than how it was done historically. It's been over a decade, this vitriol feels misdirected at this point. I cannot imagine going back to the cesspool of sysv rc-style init. What a headache. > This default is almost always the last way you want an init system to do. It should never be the default. What do you propose is a better default? If there is one, then distro maintainers are free to select it. I think the default chosen is very reasonable. > And now it thinks it should add another OOM killer, before the kernel! Talk about feature bloat! There absolutely should be another OOM killer. This strikes me as pure ignorance of dealing with OOM situations with any sort of intelligence. The problem you highlight lands squarely with the Ubuntu maintainers not configuring their desktop environment properly. They should be configuring the user session slice with looser memory pressure constraints, but generally handling OOM further down the stack is a very, very good thing. A proper desktop environment might take advantage of these controls to suspend resource-hungry applications not in the foreground. This also opens up the door to things like asking browsers to dump cache when they create memory pressure, and generally playing nicer with other applications.
- b112 4y ago
  I'm not sure what rose tinted glasses you're wearing but this is certainly a take. Experience, maintaining 1000s of concurrent servers, VMs, for dozens of companies, over 30 years, had shown me how systemd has been a negative, not a positive. Part of the issue, as I highlighted, is feature scope. In fact, I said nothing bad about core systemd, as an init system. As I said prior, as an init system, it would have been fine without all the added bloat. But here we have it handling everything under the sun, but again.. poorly. Which leads to another issue, change. An init system is about stability, and stability is absolutely more difficult with change. Systemd should shed everything not directly init related, and spend all efforts to stabilize, and keep pace with mainline, and kernel changes. That, and nothing else. In terms of OOM, there is little point of discussion here, you're too far out in left field, too far from the admin world, to even hear me.
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
tannhaeuser 4y ago
> Someone at redhat needs to pull 90% of the systemd team, and go into maint mode. Lennart Poettering has already left RH for working at MS.

auslegung 4y ago

> OSS funding is a hard problem. OSS was best when it wasn't funded at all. “Best” is subjective yet I don’t disagree. But what you don’t mention, which I think is important to mention here, is the proliferation of OSS that other vital, closed source software (often monetized) depends upon. OSS has always powered vital software, I’m just making the point that it’s increasingly, alarmingly common. “Alarming” because the OSS developers often feel they should be compensated if their work is monetized and/or powers other vital software. There is a license for this, but it’s difficulty and complicated to enforce. And it’s not surprising for someone to license their work as “do whatever you want with it” at first, only to change their mind later when they see it used in FAANG products. But then it’s too late, and bitterness and anger creep in. Take the anger and bitterness of a generation+ of OSS developers and you have our current predicament :(

zozbot234 4y ago

> Contradicting the corporate politicians is dangerous, because often they have installed dozens of other developers who always agree with them Or you can fork the project and ignore the politics altogether; FLOSS licenses will always protect your right to do this. Open source is a do-ocracy.

ricardobeat 4y ago
Unfortunately things have changed in a way that makes this route not viable. Forking a popular project maintained by a corporation is guaranteed failure, as people will look at github stars, number of existing users, and corporate backing itself as indicators of 'quality', while you have none.
- oivey 4y ago
  I’m not sure that that’s worse than before. Before GitHub, your fork would probably be just as hard or if not harder to discover. The same issues would exist with credibility, too.

RobotToaster 4y ago

I feel like I agree with you, but I'm going to need some examples. The closest example I can think of is firefox seemingly getting worse every version since they removed native extensions.