Comment by EmanueleAina | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EmanueleAina | Hacker News Reader

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RedHat and Samsung open source contributions aren't really comparable, despite the latter having got much better lately. Despite me being a long time Debian user, I've always appreciated how RedHat employees have always been community members first and RH employees second.

Note that systemd was not pushed to anything: several members of the various open source communities appreciated their features and considered it worth to be used and even made the default. Please read the long, technical and detailed discussion Debian had before choosing systemd as their default init system while still providing sysvinit as a supported choice: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708

Also Intel developers didn't design GNOME 3 for touch screens. Sure, Clutter development was at some point carried on by Intel, but most of the GNOME design comes from RedHat and volunteers. That said, it's true that GNOME cares for keyboard, mouse and touch interaction: and I'm very happy that they care about touch, thanks to them using the touchscreen on my new laptop has been a pleasure.

To answer your concerns, both systemd and GNOME see a big investment from RedHat in their development, but the developers are influencing RedHat's choices more than the opposite. Keep also in mind that a huge number of contributions still comes from non-RedHat developers for both systemd and GNOME, at the moment there's no risk that the company will drag these projects where their maintainers don't want to go.

> Note that systemd was not pushed to anything

Please stop the revisionist history - it is well documented[1] that Lennart Poettering himself is the one that pushed GNOME to depend strictly on systemd. This was used as leverage against Debian, and became a key reason for several of the votes for systemd in the infamous technical-committee vote.

[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-May/...

No revisionism here:

1) in no possible way "I'd like to propose systemd" can be seen as forcefully "pushing" something

2) please go read (or re-read) the full discussion behind the Debian tech-ctte decision[1] to understand how little the GNOME dependency mattered

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/727708

1) systemd was not pushed at GNOME; the GNOME dependency was the leverage used to push systemd at distributions. This let the systemd cabal look innocent with GNOME getting the blame for any compatibility issues. This is a very common political tactic that is popular because it gives plausible deniability and usually requires more than a sound-bite to refute. Surely you've seen it before.

2) I read debate on the Debian tech-ctte and surrounding discussion in realtime when it happened. GNOME compatibility was a key concern, and while the idea of dropping GNOME was briefly considered, concerns about supporting GNOME ended up having significant sway and a big reason - though not the only reason - why systemd won the vote.

This would normally be a purely technical decision, but in this case the GNOME->systemd dependence only exists because Lennart Poettering created it.

If you talk about cabals, there's no point in having a sensible discussion. Te existence of secret cabals is a matter of faith, and you cannot really discuss things of faith with reason alone.

In any case, both GNOME and Debian willingly adopted systemd. Thinking otherwise implies that GNOME and Debian developers are silly idiots: it that's the case, why bother. If it's not the case, they know what they want and nobody forcecully "pushed" anything.

I was waiting for someone to reveal their ignorance by calling out "cabal". Why should anybody trust your other comments about the history of systemd when you don't know that "cabal" is Lennart Poettering's term for the systemd core developers?

http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...

    The systemd cabal (Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack,
    Tom Gundersen, David Herrmann, and yours truly) ...

You either don't know the meaning of the word "irony" or you have some issues with cause→effect relations.

Just going on the record , I am not against systemd or redhat or Samsung . Even though my comment was hypothetically, it is good strategy for software company to hunt projects by recruiting main maintainer of project you can change project direction.

> and I'm very happy that they care about touch, thanks to them using the touchscreen on my new laptop has been a pleasure.

finally , after some years I met first person who use gnome touch . Honestly do you use it in your production system ? what is your system specification ? Do you encounter any lag when you using it heavily ? (in my spare time I have done android development on gnome 3+ , which was absolute nightmare , 50+ tab in chrome , VM , IDE , almost 6GB of my 8GB was used all the time , in this situation gnome 3 ridiculous _in my opinion_ animations was torture/painful for me. I changed it to xfce .

>at the moment there's no risk that the company will drag these projects where their maintainers don't want to go

This was not my point.

systemd was certainly pushed to RHEL and Fedora.

Debian lacks strong leadership with vision, and so they simply did what they always do which is to blindly follow RedHat's lead.

> pushed to RHEL and Fedora

It's more like systemd was developed for Fedora/RHEL, given that a good chunk of its developers are from Red Hat.

Also, I doubt that the Fedora/RHEL maintainers are a bunch of loons easily fooled by systemd developers, so I guess they willing adopted it and nothing has been pushed. If instead they are the loons you seem to imply, I wouldn't care much about their decisions.

> Debian lacks strong leadership with vision, and so they simply did what they always do which is to blindly follow RedHat's lead

Ah ah ah, no. Please go re-read https://bugs.debian.org/727708

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