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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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 :-).

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   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. :)

    > 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)

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?

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