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I think the trick with systemd is to realise that it's not unix.

I keep coming back to that. It seems to me that there is a tension in the Linux world about people who want an open source UNIX and people who want an open source Windows. Systemd is much more a "Windows" approach to system configuration management than a "UNIX" approach.

That isn't "bad" per se but it makes for some confusing things. I would be ok if Linux became the open source windows flavored OS and Freebsd became the open source unix flavored OS. I believe such an explicit step would help folks move forward with "where" a certain idiom of OS management should land in the open source world. Of course I don't expect that to happen :-).

systemd is 100% free software, unlink Windows. systemd has a command line interface unlike most Windows tools. And I don't know what is the Windows init system but I doubt it is similar to systemd. It's probably much closer to the Mac OS X init than Windows'.

Seriously, it does not make any sense to say that systemd is a "Windows" approach.

Not only is it Free Software, but LP was nice enough to make the entire thing accessible over RPC, so that non-free software could easily integrate with the OS at the lowest levels (PID1!), bypassing GPL/LGPL restrictions, and removing much of the reason to write Free Software on Linux at all.

How this isn't worse than Tivo-ization (the reason the GPLv3 was written!), now how RMS/Moglen aren't screaming about this, I'll never know.

Well, traditional UNIX is also accessible over RPC usable by non-free software. They're just known as pipes.

Spawning processes and communicating over pipes is a UNIX tradition and also lets you sidestep the GPL. Should RMS be screaming about that too?

Did you really just compare systemd (giving non-free software a PID1 GPL backdoor) to Unix pipes?

Maybe you can explain what a "derivative work" means to you, in relation to the GPL?

    > Systemd is much more a "Windows" approach to system
    > configuration management

I can't see your Windows analogy. The Windows init system compares badly to everything in play here - it doesn't make the system observable or discoverable or give power to the user or do a good job of centralising control.

There would be a comparison to Mac OSX, which has rounded the corners of init with its own approach.

It's also worth mentioning that all mainstream unix (even OpenBSD) deviates from unix philosophy in places. A trivial example - the way that /bin/ls changes behaviour depending on whether it's outputting to stdout or to pipe. If there's a gold standard, it's Plan 9. And almost nobody uses that.

I'm not fully qualified to have my own opinion on launchd, although people who I respect fully describe it as being a very poor init system.

theres some discussion here though: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/systemd-vs-launchd.44973/

(I'm just commenting to make sure people know that OSX's init system is not exactly without major criticism from people who know there stuff)

   I would be ok if Linux became the open source windows flavored OS and Freebsd became the open source unix flavored OS.

This mindset should terrify everyone in the GNU foundation. systemd is the begining of the march away from both the GNU and GPL principles, into an incompatible fork of POSIX that uses RPC backdoors in order to circumvent GPL protections.

why doesn't anyone else view systemd as the direct assault on GNU that it is?

RPC Backdoors? Care to elaborate on this for me?

Perhaps you could ask yourself "how, as a non-free software developer, could I use systemd's RPC system to bypass the LGPL and GPL's requirements that all related software and derivative software must be licensed under the same license?"

The answer will come quickly, I bet. it's how you figure out magic tricks, as well. :)

I like the rationale that services should be represented by a graph, and I'd like to see this pick up on BSD (it's not terribly complicated to implement on top of init).

However, systemd goes way beyond that, and tries to control everything too much, in too granular detail. I wish the move from init -> systemd had been more gradual, there was no need to rewrite absolutely everything around init.

init was the foot in the door that LP needed to start his larger rewrite of Linux into a non-GNU creature.

I don't follow.

Application containers were born out of a variety of reasons, but primarily seem to be oriented around partitioning a host OS into individual resource namespaces each with its own library context. Thus, an attempt to address the fact that the host OS is deficient in providing a multi-tenant experience out of the box.

In fact, application container deployments frequently don't use an init and process supervisor at all, but when they do it's a bare minimum loop that reaps zombies and reexecs a process on SIGCHLD.

On the linux side, the kernel will start to play second fiddle to the systemd.

That much is true, for better or for worse. systemd and much of the new desktop userland is refactoring a lot of kernel components into userspace, creating the de facto equivalent of an unwieldy hybrid kernel. I suppose Tanenbaum did win that debate, after all. Sort of.

in the debian world, the package management system has become more significant than the kernel.

The package management infrastructure is basically what makes a Linux distribution a "distribution". It's the backbone. That you can create Debian stacks based on non-Linux kernels is because many Linux packages are cross-Unix.

as a development platform you'll be able to quickly put together application stacks using microserves in a way that hasn't been practical until now

Wikipedia defines microservices as:

   In computing, microservices is a software architecture
   style, in which complex applications are composed of
   small, independent processes communicating with each
   other using language-agnostic APIs. These services are
   small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task.

That sounds a lot like... the Unix philosophy, which you openly admit systemd is in opposition to.

It seems like a daemontools-style toolkit approach (e.g. s6, nosh, perp, runit, etc.) fits the "microservices" umbrella far better. Indeed, I've been seeing plenty of container configurations based on those tools.

with all of the above in mind, how does anyone think that SystemD is anything but an attack on GNU/Linux?

"Application containers were born out of a variety of reasons, but primarily seem to be oriented around partitioning a host OS into individual resource namespaces each with its own library context. Thus, an attempt to address the fact that the host OS is deficient in providing a multi-tenant experience out of the box."

Given that multi-user and multi-tasking is pretty much a massive hack on what is at the core a single task, single user design, no surprises there.

I say a massive hack, as a CPU is in essence an assembly line. It takes data and processing directives in one end and spit processed data out the other. What multitasking does is basically to halt the assembly line mid job, documents its state, clear it out, and then load onto it the state of a different job. And so it goes, cycling through all the tasks.

Then again, the apparent reason for the discontinuation of Consolekit in favor of Logind was that the latter, via its ties to systemd-as-init-and-cgroup-manager-in-chief, was multi-seat.

A concept where one pretty much recreates the mainframe on the desktop by logically assigning disparate IO devices to a "seat", and so in essence creates terminals. Apparently this is supposed to work while still maintaining the ability to plug and unplug IO devices at will. Quite the rabbit hole.