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Comment by fwxwi | Hacker News Reader

In case you ever doubted the systemd team suffers from delusions of grandeur.

Really? Like most projects, they have a logo. What's wrong with that?

A logo, a palette of colours, a typography, brand guidelines... all for an init system for Linux. They think they are fucking Coca Cola.

If you don't think that's just insane... well I'm just getting old I guess.

An init system is just one of many, many projects under the systemd umbrella.

Perhaps you should learn more about a project before launching into criticism?

Ah that is true. That reminds me that they should only be an init system and not Cthulhu.

Friendly reminder that they managed to infiltrate all distros by creating a hard dependency from GNOME to systemd, which they could only pull off because both projects belong to the same corporation.

That makes it sound pretty sinister. Personally I like systemd and the fact that it’s widely deployed. Time spent learning it feels productive in a way that learning about the internals of specific distros doesn’t.

> infiltrate all distros

> hard dependency from GNOME to systemd

> both projects belong to the same corporation

It is honestly impressive how you've managed to fit three different factually incorrect statements in a single sentence. Kudos.

GNOME and systemd are funded almost completely by Red Hat and their biggest contributors are full-time Red Hat employees.

GNOME does not run at all without systemd.

Even the biggest Linux distros, like Gentoo, struggle to create a patchset to modify GNOME so it does not require systemd; every new version of GNOME takes months to reach Gentoo stable. Most distros have bent the knee and switched to systemd because they had no other option, as GNOME is the most used Linux desktop so they kinda call the shots.

If the changes are so bad and the maintainers are ignoring proper concerns why not use one of the forks?

It's amazing, isn't it? And he makes it seem so effortlessly!

Is that true?

systemd is part of freedesktop.org (https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/) > freedesktop.org is a completely volunteer organisation with no corporate backing or funding stream. We are a member project of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., for the purposes of holding assets.

meanwhile gnome has it's own foundation at https://www.gnome.org/foundation/ > The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.

So pretty soon SystemD will add additional service of beverages and, like the Borg, assimilate Coca-Cola?

Are you similarly opposed to gnome having a logo? k8s? linux? What is the actual issue with having a logo and basic design guidelines?

Oh, I was just piling on another comment that's a dig at the ever increasing footprint of SystemD. I'm not opposed to branding effort by any FOSS project, identity is important. This effort by SystemD is a "good thing" but, I'm not likely rep their kit

They wrote down the details of how they made their logo; the typeface they used, the colors they used, and the reasoning behind it. I guess they could have just uploaded the design file.

I'm gonna guess this is the information Tobias Bernard (the designer) provided them after creating the logo. This is basic design/UI stuff in my mind.

I do find it a little funny they don't use 'systemd green' for the hyperlinks on the page, and instead use a different, similar color.

Seems pretty standard.. and while I appreciate that branding work, I feel like it's not like a ton of work or money went into it.

I've seen small-ish FOSS projects having long debates on uppercase vs lowercase in logos, libre fonts, etc. And why not, even if we don't always agree with the end result, art does tend to help build a community :)

It's an open source project, and nowadays they have logos and branding. What's the big deal?

It's identifiable and helps give a friendlier face to new contributors and outsiders.

What's the big deal? It's a non-commercial, non-market, FOSS undertaking that affects the majority of users and systems. "Brand" implies a commercial, for-profit market entity. The idea of "brands" should stay within the for-profit realm, but unfortunately, young people who fell victim to brain slugs (aka corporate interns who hone their skills by "taking part in free software" in their spare time) think it's a good idea to spread this logic of for-profit companies even further, to places where it is NOT needed. It's a kind of "corporate capitalism with a human face" cr_p. And that "friendlier face to new contributors" argument is bull__it, since programmers who want to contribute to foss software are not a herd of scared animals that needs 'friendly' visual cues, and usually know what they are doing. Besides, systemd's development is centralized, and its scope is too large for a single beginner contributor, so it's ideology, like a smiley face and "Welcome!" on a fence of private property. They didn't even ask their users about their logo, why? They decided to act like an isolated corporate entity instead, contrary to precepts of non-proprietary software. I don't think community development is even a thing nowadays, everything is semi-corporate.

You should see the slick graphic skateboard decks for CNCF projects they have at KubeCon. The Prometheus one is killer.

This isn’t your grandfather’s open source, no sir.

(Edit: check the #k8sordie tag on Twitter)

The decks: https://mobile.twitter.com/danielpopes/status/11968503214918...

Ya'll realize they're slowly doing an embrace, extend, extinguish on Linux don't you?

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