3 ms·

You missed 'deprecating the alternatives' :) Somewhat jaded opinion after many years in the business, but these companies exploiting OSS for profit have learnt

by zh3 3y ago

You missed 'deprecating the alternatives' :) Somewhat jaded opinion after many years in the business, but these companies exploiting OSS for profit have learnt from how Microsoft's moves have played out over the years (and are now making their own mistakes). Given the only way they make money is by providing support, obviously they're going to go the MS route (make operation arcane and complex, as per your first point).

kelnos 3y ago
> You missed 'deprecating the alternatives' I don't want to disagree too hard with this, because I, too, have been uncomfortable with the march toward making it very difficult to build a Linux system without things like systemd (I actually don't have all that much of a problem with systemd anymore, but I also value choice). But no one company can deprecate anything. The source is all there, under permissive licenses. If people want sysvinit or openrc (etc.) to work well in order to build systems without systemd (for example), they are free to maintain, support, and evangelize them. And this happens, to some degree. If it's not happening to the degree we're all happy with, then we should pitch in to help, either with our labor, or financially. Otherwise we don't really get a say.
- bamfly 3y ago
  They just have to make it hard/risky/expensive to keep using things they've declared deprecated, or to avoid the software they're pushing & steering. Which they've done pretty damn effectively (again, if this were all somehow accidentally, holy shit, it shouldn't have been, because, wow, it's been a highly-successful-and-effective set of business maneuvers executed over a span of years) Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible)—it matters that any commercial competitor's only realist option, short of a massive and risky investment, is offering the same things Red Hat does, but with less influence on those projects. They want it to be expensive to build a competitor that's not a Red Hat knockoff—and if that's not what they wanted, well, somehow they took a whole bunch of steps over a span of years to make it happen anyway, by accident I suppose, but the outcome's the same.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    > Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible) Don't forget alpine is also openrc and it is far more used by corporate tech than gentoo. Especially as a base for containers.
- notabee 3y ago
  As ever, solidarity matters. The only way to get out of these embrace, extend, extinguish cycles is to form independent organizations that are never beholden to a single company or even a small handful. Individuals can't stand up to the efforts of teams of company-paid developers just by contributing their free time. But it's very hard to create such an organization without the companies immediately recognizing the need to stuff as many of their proxies into said org to gain influence, and that's a difficult thing to counter. As an ecosystem, we need to contend not only with whether a particular thing like systemd works well or solves a problem but also whether it has predatory intentions. This is simply what the incentives lead to unless the community has a strong voice to counter such attempts. And in this day and age, that also includes dealing with all the submarine articles and other consent manufacturing that are well within the budget of any large company to try to fake organic community discourse.

by zh3 3y ago

kelnos 3y ago

> You missed 'deprecating the alternatives' I don't want to disagree too hard with this, because I, too, have been uncomfortable with the march toward making it very difficult to build a Linux system without things like systemd (I actually don't have all that much of a problem with systemd anymore, but I also value choice). But no one company can deprecate anything. The source is all there, under permissive licenses. If people want sysvinit or openrc (etc.) to work well in order to build systems without systemd (for example), they are free to maintain, support, and evangelize them. And this happens, to some degree. If it's not happening to the degree we're all happy with, then we should pitch in to help, either with our labor, or financially. Otherwise we don't really get a say.

bamfly 3y ago
They just have to make it hard/risky/expensive to keep using things they've declared deprecated, or to avoid the software they're pushing & steering. Which they've done pretty damn effectively (again, if this were all somehow accidentally, holy shit, it shouldn't have been, because, wow, it's been a highly-successful-and-effective set of business maneuvers executed over a span of years) Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible)—it matters that any commercial competitor's only realist option, short of a massive and risky investment, is offering the same things Red Hat does, but with less influence on those projects. They want it to be expensive to build a competitor that's not a Red Hat knockoff—and if that's not what they wanted, well, somehow they took a whole bunch of steps over a span of years to make it happen anyway, by accident I suppose, but the outcome's the same.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible) Don't forget alpine is also openrc and it is far more used by corporate tech than gentoo. Especially as a base for containers.
notabee 3y ago
As ever, solidarity matters. The only way to get out of these embrace, extend, extinguish cycles is to form independent organizations that are never beholden to a single company or even a small handful. Individuals can't stand up to the efforts of teams of company-paid developers just by contributing their free time. But it's very hard to create such an organization without the companies immediately recognizing the need to stuff as many of their proxies into said org to gain influence, and that's a difficult thing to counter. As an ecosystem, we need to contend not only with whether a particular thing like systemd works well or solves a problem but also whether it has predatory intentions. This is simply what the incentives lead to unless the community has a strong voice to counter such attempts. And in this day and age, that also includes dealing with all the submarine articles and other consent manufacturing that are well within the budget of any large company to try to fake organic community discourse.