Ts’o and Linus And The Impotent Rage Against systemd | Hacker News Reader

Ts’o and Linus And The Impotent Rage Against systemd

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17 pointstlitd8 comments

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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?)

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. :)

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?

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...

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