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Comment by boje | Hacker News Reader

Linux Desktop is starting to smell a lot like Android now judging by how vertically integrated it is becoming. With the push for a permissively-licensed (MIT, BSD etc.) userland and concentration of developers within a small group of companies and orgs sponsored by them, they might eventually do what Google is doing and start delaying releases for sourcecode, or stop altogether. (MIT, BSD and other licenses do not mandate the distribution of source code alongside binaries like the GPL family does.)

It's may get harder in the future to have a Linux desktop that keeps up with the times and also does not include third-party cruft or spyware in the future.

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This makes no sense given development is not driven by any one entity that might work privately and start publishing later. All development on these projects is done in the open by a variety of entities who have no mutual interest in colluding in this way.

Systemd is a mix of GPL2 and LGPL. Flatpak is LGPL. Neither has a CLA. Many other parts of the ecosystem are GPLs. It makes no sense for this ecosystem to start serving up primarily FOSS applications with FOSS ethos-es as a proprietarified storefront.

> they might eventually do what Google is doing and start delaying releases for sourcecode

Who is "they" here? There's no value to gain from closing the freedesktop ecosystem: no company has a distribution chokepoint like Google does with Play Store, the overall PC market is in decline and everyone would switch to existing anti-systemd alternatives.

I would imagine Red Hat are pretty close to "they", since they created Systemd and then there was the RHEL redistribution controversy [ https://old.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/14k8jmw/can_someone... ].

I too guess they meant Red Hat. But that move just resulted in really big clients switching to RHEL derivatives like Rocky or Almalinux. Closing systemd would spawn a fork and possibly an specification effort for non-systemd components to join in.

I just don’t see it. Linux is about choice, if something sucks there is almost certainly an alternative. All 3 people using flatpak but not systemd will just have to use one of the million other ways to install a program.

> they might eventually

That seems like a long series of pessimistic stretches.

I don't love churn but this slow plumbing unification around systemd is delivering a better experience for most. And I don't recognise the push away from copyleft, certainly not in this context.

if people want that they will keep using and supporting (and contributing to) Debian. so far it seems that there's quite some trust toward these projects.

the evolutionarily optimal ratio of predator:prey fluctuates based on how close/far are we to ZIRP.

Those not liking systemd here already moved from debian to devuan.

Luckily “Linux desktop” is not a single thing. There are many options to choose from. I’d dial the FUD down just a bit.

The entire problem here is that flatpak is exerting pressure to make it a single thing.

Which is a big reason why the Year of Linux Desktop has been delivered in WSL and Virtualization Framework, eventually Googlebooks.

Dunno man, for me the year of Linux Desktop was 1996. Happy ever since.

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