

Ts’o and Linus And The Impotent Rage Against systemd - tlitd
https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/

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iskander
I think the tone of this submission is below the typical community standards
of Hacker News.

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dandrews
Yes, it is rabid and paranoid, and the repeated "fanboy" references are rather
childish. But the article did bring up important points about RedHat's
consistent embrace-and-extend history, which is well worth thinking about.

So I won't be flagging this one.

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asveikau
Maybe it's not likely to get much support from HN users, but I do find it very
interesting to find parallels between sociopolitical labels and software
attitudes. So while some may find a label like "fascist" to be very loaded, it
does seem strangely apt to describe proponents of a software design that
favors a big monolithic daemon that wishes to be in charge of everything, does
not let the end user to customize as much, etc., in contrast to a more
anarchistic traditional Unix approach emphasizing the opposite attitudes.

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chronid
I believe it's better to put politics as far away as possible from this
discussion. Nothing good will come from finding those kind of parallels.

That said, I don't like the attitude of systemd devs at all (like I don't like
the attitude of GNOME devs...). But the only way to make them lose it is to
build something _better_ than systemd - before it becomes so entreched that
getting it out of a linux box will be impossible without losing basic
functionalities.

That said, systemd is not really _that_ much monolithic.

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asveikau
> Nothing good will come from finding those kind of parallels.

Except that it offers a pretty good explanation for why people get so crazy
about these debates, and provides a context under which I can say there is
legitimate debate that ultimately boils down to personality differences.

(This is one problem I have with the HN stance of politics-avoidance. What
happens when politics is the completely honest answer?)

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chronid
The reason people get so crazy about this debate, at least, is that many see
this as "land grabbing" done in a passive/aggressive manner by RH employees
(merging udev and systemd under the same repo and having to build systemd to
build udev is an example of that) and their pet project. Again.

People is bound to hate it. RH won't care anyway, they control the core of
every modern linux system and can do what they please. It's not like the users
are contributors or customers. They are not _technically_ part of the
"community".

I'm not saying that politics have nothing to do with this. This IS politics,
in its broadest sense. But making parallels with movements and ideologies is
not very useful to the discussion, I think. :)

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greenyoda
There are free alternatives to Linux, such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Does anyone
know whether their development is influenced as much by large companies as
Linux is?

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chronid
It's probably not. Those projects do not have a comparable userbase, so that
is somewhat expected - but that missing popularity comes with another set of
problems...

