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Comment by morelisp | Hacker News Reader

> They did write the code to fork elongind in such a way that it no longer required systemd; they did write the code so that GNOME could run without logind like every other system; they did write the code to fork of udev from systemd again so that it could run without glibc.

It sounds to me like the bazaar system is working fine qua its own standards, then. Red Hat writes what they need to solve their problems, party X writes what they need to solve their problems, the code is shared, everyone gets what they want.

Except: It sounds like what you really want is for Red Hat to solve your problems, not only their problems. That's definitely not how this stuff shook out historically. And it opens a door you might not want to open, because now you need to ask yourself why users liked systemd, and what obligations you have to support beyond your own needs in your own software.

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> It sounds to me like the bazaar system is working fine qua its own standards, then. Red Hat writes what they need to solve their problems, party X writes what they need to solve their problems, the code is shared, everyone gets what they want.

The difference is that Red Hat's problem is not making enough money, and everyone's problem is software not working because Red Hat breaks functionality to make more money.

Red Hat's “problems” are similar to the “problem” Apple experienced that that heir hardware was interoperable with third party hardware, so they made sure to use proprietary cables that only work with Apple hardware.

> Except: It sounds like what you really want is for Red Hat to solve your problems, not only their problems. That's definitely not how this stuff shook out historically. And it opens a door you might not want to open, because now you need to ask yourself why users liked systemd, and what obligations you have to support beyond your own needs in your own software.

No, what I want is for Red Hat to stop product tying, which you conveniently ignored and didn't address.

What they're doing isn't solving any technical problems any more than Apple is doing by using proprietary cables when standard cables suffice.

If you're asking for Red Hat to stop creating integrations between different parts of their distribution, that isn't going to happen. That's one of the benefits you get from being a distribution vendor. Every Linux distribution that grows past a certain size does that eventually, that's how you create a cohesive system. They make money from this because customers actually ask them to do it. You're essentially asking them to kill their core product.

Describing systemd as "product tying" is ridiculous. The product is the OS distribution. Even in the heady days of a dozen of diverging Unix vendors, nobody was pitching their user-pluggable init system. What's next, coreutils and busybox are illegal, because I don't want my `cp` and `mv` from the same vendor?

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