9 ms·

This init process debate has brought out one of the worst elements of people in the FOSS community: treating some FOSS technology as an extension of their ident

by navait 12y ago

This init process debate has brought out one of the worst elements of people in the FOSS community: treating some FOSS technology as an extension of their identity. Let's keep some perspective here. We are literally just talking about an init system. There are many others you can use. systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom". Debates should be about the technical merits of system not baseless accusations that they are making a power grab.

Karunamon 12y ago
> systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom" This is absolutely incorrect. We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it. I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd. (To which the response from the systemd folks was something along the lines of "You shouldn't be turning it off anyways") (Great, now our software takes philosophical positions...) Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about. Meanwhile, in the real world, populated by end users and sysadmins, the most important people when it comes to a computing environment, the ones that all of this crap is being done for at the end of the day... not so much. sigh I'm annoyed that systemd is taking over for political reasons and not purely on its technical merits, and that there is no way this is not going to lead to a monoculture. There will be others, but they will be relegated to the position of marginalized, niche players that nobody outside of /g/ troll threads care about. I'm annoyed that the rest of the world is going to have to adapt to this software, rather than the other way around. I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do.
- navait 12y ago
  If there's one thing I've learned about FOSS, it's that everyone is looking for an excuse to fork things. Linux will never develop a monoculture - because someone can and will fork it. How many distributions are there? desktop environments? Package managers? Text editors and IDEs? And even zooming out of linux, there's openBSD, freeBSD, etc; If you start yelling about monoculture, isn't sysv init the worst offender for that? We have less monocultures than ever before. If you think freedom is the ability to run only the code you want, the only way you're ever going to get freedom is by writing everything from scratch. Software will never be exactly the way you want it to be unless you write it yourself. Most software depends on other software. That's just how things work. GNOME is particularly bad offender for that - it installed apache for some reason last time I used it. But GNOME also does a lot of things I don't really need it to do. Maybe someone else uses those features, and that's OK. You can switch DE if you really don't like systemd that much. But if you don't, that's not denying you your freedom - you made a decision about the benefits and drawbacks of a product, and decided to use that product. Nobody really says how systemd only took over for political reasons, there's just random posts on forums that make claims and link to some dude's podcast. There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious. I think systemd is the wrong choice for debian/ubuntu. But there's no reason to badmouth people about it and say hurtful things. Just use something else.
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    > There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious. You're kidding, right? http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May/019657.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May... http://linuxfr.org/nodes/86687/comments/1249943 http://linuxfr.org/nodes/86687/comments/1249943 http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01327.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01327.html The systemd people and Lennart in particular are very open about their contempt for anything that isn't Linux + systemd and their intent to shove whatever they want down everybody's throats regardless of bugs or breakage, and blame everyone but themselves for what their shit breaks. This can't be dressed up as anything but malicious.
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      That last thread in particular is a case study in why people don't like systemd. Thank gods that the BFDL of Linux is a sane man.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    GNU/Linux wars have replaced the UNIX wars....
- cbsmith 12y ago
  > We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it. Wow... we've come a long way baby! Now freely available software that you can modify as needed without interference is taking away your freedom! ;-) > I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd. Actually, the problem is that if you load IPv6 support after a socket was created, there's no efficient way to make that existing socket compatible with IPv6, which of course creates a nasty little integration problem. That wasn't a choice of the systemd folks, that was a choice of how the kernel folks organized their network subsystem & modules. Systemd runs fine on my system with no IPv6 support. > Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about. For all the complaining about NIH syndrome and absorbing other projects for political purposes, systemd actually builds on top of a lot of very well established components (dbus, udev, etc.). To the extent that software gets tightly coupled with it, it wouldn't be hard to change it so that it used those standard components without systemd... unless systemd is actually providing some unique advantages for that software that you can't live without. In which case... go out and do a better job of it! > I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do. I know, Unix is annoying that way. ;-)
  - andrewflnr 12y ago
    Call it flexibility, then. I don't think you can reasonably deny that a package that requires major surgery to work with a different init system is less flexible than one that simply doesn't care, even if said surgery is perfectly legal with the source available. That flexibility is a large part of why a lot of us came to Linux, and regardless of whether it's technically "freedom", losing it feels like losing freedom.
    - cbsmith 12y ago
      > I don't think you can reasonably deny that a package that requires major surgery to work with a different init system is less flexible than one that simply doesn't care, even if said surgery is perfectly legal with the source available. I think you'll find that it isn't nearly that difficult a problem to address. For all kinds of reasons, just like every other system design that has come before it, there will need to be accommodations made to work with other stuff. Its not like the old code just disappears overnight. You can't succeed as a new platform without a way of working with the old (and again, you've mostly been sold a bill of goods... most of systemd's architecture is the old system). > That flexibility is a large part of why a lot of us came to Linux, and regardless of whether it's technically "freedom", losing it feels like losing freedom. If it feels like losing freedom to you, you don't know what that is about. You're losing someone writing code the way you wanted them to. That's not losing freedom. That's getting it.
rdtsc 12y ago
> There are many others you can use. I understand your good motivations but just saying "it will be ok" doesn't make the problem go away. Yes I can write my own init system, that's good. Can I uninstall systemd from most system that install and depend on it by default. Write my own distro? You can't just easily plug and play it. It is a big like the kernel. Just swapping out Linux kernel with a FreeBSD one doesn't quite work. > system not baseless accusations that they are making a power grab. With that I agree. Maybe to get the conversation back on track is to present a few valid technical points in response. Or just ignore it. Saying "hold up people, no fighting please" doesn't work as well in such forums.
- e12e 12y ago
  > It is a big like the kernel. Just swapping out Linux kernel with a FreeBSD one doesn't quite work. Well, actually that's the heart of the problem right there. Systemd mangles and complects things. You can replace the kernel (see Debian/kfreebsd and to a lesser extent Illumos). Or you can make a "distro" like cygwin/mingw et al for windows and homebrew for os x. Because there are some more or less well defined interfaces between userland and kernel space. Not just "shit that systemd does that makes sense on recent linux kernels" (afaik there's no plans for supporting something like linux 2.4 on small embedded systems for example).
papaf 12y ago
Let's keep some perspective here. We are literally just talking about an init system. Systemd does more than just init, it has the features to replace everything from network manager to fstab. It is not just an init system it is an invasion of Linux userspace. Don't take my word for it, just read the developers blog: http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/fudcon-gnomeasia.html http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/fudcon-gnomeasia.html
lmm 12y ago
> systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom" Systemd has made it impossible for me to run an up-to-date Gnome on FreeBSD. That feels a lot like taking away my freedom.
- clarry 12y ago
  There's legal freedom, and there's practical freedom. Sadly, the latter is seldom talked about. You can be stuck in a maze, in a pit or under a tree trunk. You're legally free, since no law or copyright license is saying may not get out. Yet, you're stuck and if you can't get out, you're not free at all. When it comes to software, it is the size, complexity and complicated interdependencies that make the maze. As the system grows, an individual's practical freedom erodes. For instance, I complain about the web a lot. Even with a browser's source code and a permissive free license, there's close to nothing I can change about it in practice. It would be far too much work for me to maintain millions of lines of code and remain compatible and interoperable with a huge, fast-changing stack of technology... and the more you diverge, the harder it becomes. It's an uphill battle, and at some point you have to give up if you're not the giant. So the four software freedoms are reduced to two (or less). In practice I don't have the freedom to do what I want. I think the FSF's stance of reducing freedom to a merely ethical issue is alarming. How would Dr. Stallman have felt if he had gotten his printer driver with a free license but so much code and complexity and dependency that it would've been impossible for him and a small team of hackers to actually port it and make it run on his system? Of course, systemd alone is not approaching that level of complexity. Except that it's not only systemd.. the trend seems to be that all aspects of a modern OS are getting larger and more complicated. A little here, a little there, it all adds up and becomes a lot, everywhere. It's a sad trend. There was a time when you could've picked up a book that pretty much describes all of your system's hardware at a low enough level so that you could start writing your own bootloader and OS from scratch, with the knowledge that you can interface with all the logical hardware devices. And it didn't take hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Now the amount of accumulated cruft we depend on is so large that the idea of writing your own not-a-toy OS is laughable... Standing on the shoulders of a giant is necessary and helpful, but when you have to do too much of it, it stifles innovation and encourages monocultures. I don't have anything against systemd per se; it doesn't represent my ideals, doesn't bring me features I want, and so I don't want to use it. If Ubuntu and Debian want to use it, they're of course free to do so. However, I am concerned that with the notion that "systemd has won", its proponents are going to assume it to be everywhere and build future software with the attitude that it is okay to depend on it -- who cares about the people who would prefer not to use it, let them suffer for disagreeing with the king! Before the systemd rage, sysvinit might have been "the winner" on Linux in the sense that it was most widely used and supported. But we didn't have this sort of polarizing "sysvinit has won, fuck everyone and everything else" notion. Other distros with other init systems have happily coexisted all along, and these other distros haven't had to constantly fight a growing dependency on one specific init system.

by navait 12y ago

Karunamon 12y ago

> systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom" This is absolutely incorrect. We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it. I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd. (To which the response from the systemd folks was something along the lines of "You shouldn't be turning it off anyways") (Great, now our software takes philosophical positions...) Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about. Meanwhile, in the real world, populated by end users and sysadmins, the most important people when it comes to a computing environment, the ones that all of this crap is being done for at the end of the day... not so much. sigh I'm annoyed that systemd is taking over for political reasons and not purely on its technical merits, and that there is no way this is not going to lead to a monoculture. There will be others, but they will be relegated to the position of marginalized, niche players that nobody outside of /g/ troll threads care about. I'm annoyed that the rest of the world is going to have to adapt to this software, rather than the other way around. I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do.

navait 12y ago
If there's one thing I've learned about FOSS, it's that everyone is looking for an excuse to fork things. Linux will never develop a monoculture - because someone can and will fork it. How many distributions are there? desktop environments? Package managers? Text editors and IDEs? And even zooming out of linux, there's openBSD, freeBSD, etc; If you start yelling about monoculture, isn't sysv init the worst offender for that? We have less monocultures than ever before. If you think freedom is the ability to run only the code you want, the only way you're ever going to get freedom is by writing everything from scratch. Software will never be exactly the way you want it to be unless you write it yourself. Most software depends on other software. That's just how things work. GNOME is particularly bad offender for that - it installed apache for some reason last time I used it. But GNOME also does a lot of things I don't really need it to do. Maybe someone else uses those features, and that's OK. You can switch DE if you really don't like systemd that much. But if you don't, that's not denying you your freedom - you made a decision about the benefits and drawbacks of a product, and decided to use that product. Nobody really says how systemd only took over for political reasons, there's just random posts on forums that make claims and link to some dude's podcast. There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious. I think systemd is the wrong choice for debian/ubuntu. But there's no reason to badmouth people about it and say hurtful things. Just use something else.
- nknighthb 12y ago
  > There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious. You're kidding, right? http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May/019657.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May... http://linuxfr.org/nodes/86687/comments/1249943 http://linuxfr.org/nodes/86687/comments/1249943 http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01327.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01327.html The systemd people and Lennart in particular are very open about their contempt for anything that isn't Linux + systemd and their intent to shove whatever they want down everybody's throats regardless of bugs or breakage, and blame everyone but themselves for what their shit breaks. This can't be dressed up as anything but malicious.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    That last thread in particular is a case study in why people don't like systemd. Thank gods that the BFDL of Linux is a sane man.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  GNU/Linux wars have replaced the UNIX wars....
cbsmith 12y ago
> We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it. Wow... we've come a long way baby! Now freely available software that you can modify as needed without interference is taking away your freedom! ;-) > I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd. Actually, the problem is that if you load IPv6 support after a socket was created, there's no efficient way to make that existing socket compatible with IPv6, which of course creates a nasty little integration problem. That wasn't a choice of the systemd folks, that was a choice of how the kernel folks organized their network subsystem & modules. Systemd runs fine on my system with no IPv6 support. > Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about. For all the complaining about NIH syndrome and absorbing other projects for political purposes, systemd actually builds on top of a lot of very well established components (dbus, udev, etc.). To the extent that software gets tightly coupled with it, it wouldn't be hard to change it so that it used those standard components without systemd... unless systemd is actually providing some unique advantages for that software that you can't live without. In which case... go out and do a better job of it! > I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do. I know, Unix is annoying that way. ;-)
- andrewflnr 12y ago
  Call it flexibility, then. I don't think you can reasonably deny that a package that requires major surgery to work with a different init system is less flexible than one that simply doesn't care, even if said surgery is perfectly legal with the source available. That flexibility is a large part of why a lot of us came to Linux, and regardless of whether it's technically "freedom", losing it feels like losing freedom.
  - cbsmith 12y ago
    > I don't think you can reasonably deny that a package that requires major surgery to work with a different init system is less flexible than one that simply doesn't care, even if said surgery is perfectly legal with the source available. I think you'll find that it isn't nearly that difficult a problem to address. For all kinds of reasons, just like every other system design that has come before it, there will need to be accommodations made to work with other stuff. Its not like the old code just disappears overnight. You can't succeed as a new platform without a way of working with the old (and again, you've mostly been sold a bill of goods... most of systemd's architecture is the old system). > That flexibility is a large part of why a lot of us came to Linux, and regardless of whether it's technically "freedom", losing it feels like losing freedom. If it feels like losing freedom to you, you don't know what that is about. You're losing someone writing code the way you wanted them to. That's not losing freedom. That's getting it.

rdtsc 12y ago

> There are many others you can use. I understand your good motivations but just saying "it will be ok" doesn't make the problem go away. Yes I can write my own init system, that's good. Can I uninstall systemd from most system that install and depend on it by default. Write my own distro? You can't just easily plug and play it. It is a big like the kernel. Just swapping out Linux kernel with a FreeBSD one doesn't quite work. > system not baseless accusations that they are making a power grab. With that I agree. Maybe to get the conversation back on track is to present a few valid technical points in response. Or just ignore it. Saying "hold up people, no fighting please" doesn't work as well in such forums.

e12e 12y ago
> It is a big like the kernel. Just swapping out Linux kernel with a FreeBSD one doesn't quite work. Well, actually that's the heart of the problem right there. Systemd mangles and complects things. You can replace the kernel (see Debian/kfreebsd and to a lesser extent Illumos). Or you can make a "distro" like cygwin/mingw et al for windows and homebrew for os x. Because there are some more or less well defined interfaces between userland and kernel space. Not just "shit that systemd does that makes sense on recent linux kernels" (afaik there's no plans for supporting something like linux 2.4 on small embedded systems for example).

papaf 12y ago

Let's keep some perspective here. We are literally just talking about an init system. Systemd does more than just init, it has the features to replace everything from network manager to fstab. It is not just an init system it is an invasion of Linux userspace. Don't take my word for it, just read the developers blog: http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/fudcon-gnomeasia.html http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/fudcon-gnomeasia.html

lmm 12y ago

> systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom" Systemd has made it impossible for me to run an up-to-date Gnome on FreeBSD. That feels a lot like taking away my freedom.

clarry 12y ago
There's legal freedom, and there's practical freedom. Sadly, the latter is seldom talked about. You can be stuck in a maze, in a pit or under a tree trunk. You're legally free, since no law or copyright license is saying may not get out. Yet, you're stuck and if you can't get out, you're not free at all. When it comes to software, it is the size, complexity and complicated interdependencies that make the maze. As the system grows, an individual's practical freedom erodes. For instance, I complain about the web a lot. Even with a browser's source code and a permissive free license, there's close to nothing I can change about it in practice. It would be far too much work for me to maintain millions of lines of code and remain compatible and interoperable with a huge, fast-changing stack of technology... and the more you diverge, the harder it becomes. It's an uphill battle, and at some point you have to give up if you're not the giant. So the four software freedoms are reduced to two (or less). In practice I don't have the freedom to do what I want. I think the FSF's stance of reducing freedom to a merely ethical issue is alarming. How would Dr. Stallman have felt if he had gotten his printer driver with a free license but so much code and complexity and dependency that it would've been impossible for him and a small team of hackers to actually port it and make it run on his system? Of course, systemd alone is not approaching that level of complexity. Except that it's not only systemd.. the trend seems to be that all aspects of a modern OS are getting larger and more complicated. A little here, a little there, it all adds up and becomes a lot, everywhere. It's a sad trend. There was a time when you could've picked up a book that pretty much describes all of your system's hardware at a low enough level so that you could start writing your own bootloader and OS from scratch, with the knowledge that you can interface with all the logical hardware devices. And it didn't take hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Now the amount of accumulated cruft we depend on is so large that the idea of writing your own not-a-toy OS is laughable... Standing on the shoulders of a giant is necessary and helpful, but when you have to do too much of it, it stifles innovation and encourages monocultures. I don't have anything against systemd per se; it doesn't represent my ideals, doesn't bring me features I want, and so I don't want to use it. If Ubuntu and Debian want to use it, they're of course free to do so. However, I am concerned that with the notion that "systemd has won", its proponents are going to assume it to be everywhere and build future software with the attitude that it is okay to depend on it -- who cares about the people who would prefer not to use it, let them suffer for disagreeing with the king! Before the systemd rage, sysvinit might have been "the winner" on Linux in the sense that it was most widely used and supported. But we didn't have this sort of polarizing "sysvinit has won, fuck everyone and everything else" notion. Other distros with other init systems have happily coexisted all along, and these other distros haven't had to constantly fight a growing dependency on one specific init system.