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Look how many platforms X supports, how many paradigm shifts has survived. systemd already has a less flexible architecture by design that an ancient system, so in the future it'll be difficult to untangle.

You should educate yourself about FUD, I recommend the Halloween documents, where they explain the unfeasibility of FUD tactics against an open source project, e.g. if someone tries to do it they won't get anywhere.

But the patches that didn't fit the roadmap dictated by RedHat have been rejected.

Facebook also uses PHP, the most reviled language around here. Google has a developer team to rewrite components and adapt the Linux kernel, consider that.

This is a well thought out and complete response, it's just unfortunate that an image illustrating an overcomplicated system to solve a simple problem has elicited this censure; instead of the comment, in response to another user throwing a personal insult against an OSS hacker, where I call this user "a coward".

Your position about the place we want HN to be is clear, but I still believe the image is not insulting or offending anybody in any way. Those who flagged it, could they have misinterpreted it as an insult to the developers? An insult to the users? An inappropriate "scabrous" picture based on the URL? Or just as an attack to a program that needs our praise?

> combined with the scabrous smack.

The word 'scabrous' means "dealing with salacious or indecent material". Feel free to inspect the image, I guarantee it's safe for work.

> "being or not a corporation" makes a huge difference

Take a look at Mozilla, they implemented DRM, otherwise they could have lost relevance, they explained.

Now Debian must commit resources just making everything work with every new "innovation" brought by systemd. RedHat will dictate the pace and the terms, Debian will follow, and once the future "systemd + linux OS" integration has been declared standard, they can't correct the decision, they will be stuck with "systemd OS" forever.

What he says is that they used the literal name in symlinks, not a derivative term.

That's precisely the point, it's part of the quote, the more Debian standardizes on the upcoming systemd distro, it'll get erased by RedHat real fast, who offers a differentiating advantage.

   How do you differentiate your product if your core mission is to ensure
   that your product operates exactly as your competition?  The bottom
   line is that you don't .... Theoretically, you could have a better
   sales force or better service and support .... Yet these are the assets
   of the larger, entrenched companies.

> As long as there are people who can benefit from a free open-source operating system

As if Debian were the only free open-source OS... Not even considering only GNU/Linux, where Slackware was first (why not also last?).

> and people willing to dedicate their time

A complete OS will take much more than that, if Debian loses relevance, people will leave. What differentiating advantage to choose Debian over CentOS or Fedora? Debian will have to fight that battle, being or not a corporation is irrelevant.

I hope Debian endures, but you have to understand that systemd standardization is not going to be positive to Debian relevance.

No shit, I don't distribute the GNU/Linux software either, too big and inconvenient (GB) compared to a patch (bytes).

>> GPL or any other OSS license grants you the the permission

The sysvinit alternatives that I know and use, all use an OSS license, most of them less restrictive (BSD or MIT). I use free (as in freedom) software; that's why systemd is harmful to me, always trying to create incompatibilities with other open source programs lacking a multi-million corporation backer.

> Only the ones small enough that they don't worry about getting sued

You got it backwards. Precisely only the big commercial distros with mighty legal teams (Debian, RedHat, Fedora) could afford to get away with violating the GPL, and stealing the name of the original project for the fork symlinks. Try to name your toy project something even remotely similar to redhat or debian and you'll be crushed like a bug.

Here I see powerful entities taking advantage of an individual hacker.

""" During the Debian project activity, the source code distributed by Debian was modified in a way that violates GPL and Copyright and makes it impossible to legally distribute this "fork" called "cdrkit". """

""" The GPL preamble (see also Urheberrecht §14 below) disallows modifications in case they are suitable to affect the original author's reputation. As Debian installs symlinks with the original program names and as many people still believe that the symlinks with the original program names are the original software, Debian does not follow the GPL.

GPL §2a requires to keep track of any author and change date inside all changed files. This is not done in the fork.

[...]

GPL §3 requires the complete source to be distributed if there is a binary distribution. The Debian fork tarball does not include everything needed to compile the cdrtools fork (complete source) and Debian does not give a written offer to deliver the missing parts. """

I've been hearing this for decades: If Linux and *BSD are better than Windows, how come exactly zero people have made the switch?

Except they've been adopted, systemd has been mandatory only in some bigger more commercial distros.

I'll tell you one thing, I know nothing about you, but this person is considered by many the best programmer in the world, one thing is certain, compared to the good done to the world, he's various levels above you and me, he's the creator of daemontools, the way it follows the unix philosophy has been an inspiration, I'll refer you to this page about software law http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html

It seems you don't read my comments, because I've edited binaries, and distributed patches of proprietary software, that's not illegal, only I didn't distribute the binary or code without permission. Let me tell you, having systemd source doesn't help me at all because it's a megalithic blob.

Is the GPL a good thing? Yes, BUT just because you license your junk with the GPL you don't deserve a Nobel peace price. You seem to think that had Hitler released a hello world program with a GPL license he would be a saint, and can't be criticized, "fork or shut up", you say?

Your analogies are great, transmiting a clear picture of systemd, like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Professor...

Well, if Microsoft could, and did, port IE and Office to UNIX, why would the free and open software people have a problem in allowing more user choice? Why would they need to hard depend on software designed to be non-replaceable? With most free software organizations set up as nonprofit, we must hold them to a higher standard to ensure their continuity under the legal framework.

> No, actually you can't. You're not entitled to unless you specifically sought a license that permits it

Please take a look at 17 U.S. Code § 117.

Not if Linus decided that, if the Linux Foundation decided that they wanted to switch the license to proprietary. See the mailing list message of Linus against deep integration between the kernel and systemd!

> The beauty of OSS is that you can exactly do that - take the last public version and make something better, something that's more the way you like it, no matter what the original owner thinks, says or does.

Read my previous comment: The beauty of proprietary software is that you can exactly do that - take the last public version, patch it and make something better, something that's more the way you like it, no matter what the original owner thinks, says or does. :)

Don't quote me on this, but I recall reading from official channels that the last Debian version without mandatory systemd is going to see its support period indefinitely extended for a long time. Good luck! :)

Who are this developers you keep talking about? When Microsoft bundled IE, WMP with Windows, we said, OK, developers decided that the benefit is worth the dependency, they'll do it, but we didn't like that, I'm not talking about legal issues, what I'm saying is this is an attack to the GNU/Linux philosophy. If GNU/Linux closed its source and went proprietary, you would say exactly the same things: Fork or GTFO. But I would say, this is not right. I just don't want systemd bundled with necessary GNU/Linux components, like the Linux kernel, in the future. As simple as that.

All this discussion doesn't and won't preclude me from do all the things you said under "preventing the future".

Not only udev, they roadmap is to pack the whole system so as to remove any difference between linux installs, their words, not mine. Currently, we can fork udev, but in the future, are you telling my to fork the whole operating system? And all applications that unnecessarily depend on said system? That would require millions of dollars, at least.

Also, Windows can also be forked, by distributing patches instead of binaries. So that argument is a red herring, DOS has been forked before, and every proprietary application, but that doesn't mean I can't ask other developers a bit of respect for those of us who are using other init systems, I will maintain my software, just let me do that. All the discourse about democracy around GNU/Linux wasn't supposed to be summed up as "Fork or GTFO".

Ok, I agree with you entirely, just a quick response because I was quoting and so have the responsibility to avoid distorting other people's words. This didn't happen 7-10 years ago, that's when it started, but this continued happening until 2 or 3 years ago.

I hope all is clear now.

""" Ask your Linux distributor to include recent originals instead of broken forks.

Tell them that you like to decide yourself which program you choose. Whether it is the fork or whether it is the original program depends on which package works better.

[...]

The following Linux distributions currently work against the freedom of their users:

Debian, RedHat, Fedora

If you know of other unfree distributions, please report.

The following Linux distributions currently grant their users the freedom to select the better CD/DVD/Blu-Ray writing software:

Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux

I happen to like modern daemontools-like init systems a lot, (runit, s6) but I use various init systems depending on what I want, and that's great IMO.

The problem is that systemd is that is being forcefully pushed to all distros. For instance, by merging udev with systemd. We want to keep all the alternatives available.

In May 2004, a Debian packet maintainer (Eduard Bloch) started to send repeated personal insults to Jörg Schilling after one of Bloch's patch requests against mkisofs was rejected because it was full of bugs.

In March 2006, a group of Debian maintainers started to attack the cdrtools project.

The latter attacks have been based on the fact that cdrtools was licensed under the GPL. As a result, on May 15th 2006 most projects from the cdrtools project bundle have been relicensed under CDDL (giving more freedom to users than the GPL does). At the same time, an important amount of additional code (DVD support code from Jörg Schilling and a Reed Solomon decoder from Heiko Eißfeldt) has been added to the freely published sources.

In summer 2006, the attacks from the group of Debian maintainers escalated and in September 2006, these people created something they call a fork from cdrtools. They soon added a lot of bugs and this way turned the "fork" into a questionable experiment. The last work on this "fork" has been done eight months later on May 6th 2007, then the leader of the attacks stopped his efforts on the fork and instead started to advertize for nerolinux. During the Debian project activity, the source code distributed by Debian was modified in a way that violates GPL and Copyright and makes it impossible to legally distribute this "fork" called "cdrkit". There is no license problem with the original cdrtools.

cough FFmpeg cough

Your response only makes sense if your alternatives are: (1) systemd, (2) sysvinit and (3) a horrible death.

I know dozens of init systems that do much more, markedly better than systemd, and are modular so you can easily replace them when the time for a new technology comes. systemd is very recent, and still its opinionated architecture is showing inflexible to changes.

systemd is not an init system, that's how it started, but they state they want to comprise a whole OS.

Debian may seem too big to die, but they are slowly being commoditized away, because RedHat is known to offer better sales force, better service and support:

   How do you differentiate your product if your core mission is to ensure
   that your product operates exactly as your competition?  The bottom
   line is that you don't

>> that is simply FUD

You should educate yourself about FUD, I recommend the Halloween documents, where they explain the unfeasibility of FUD tactics against an open source project, and that if someone tries to do it they won't get anywhere.

I followed a link to webarchive and, coincidentally, ended up on the slashdot homepage from about 2000 I think, RedHat was becoming a threat to Linux, just like Microsoft, and it's interesting to me how well they predicted the future, they noticed that GPL, open source... (as Microsoft's github account shows) wouldn't stop a company from maneuvering, entrenching its position and dominating the marketplace.

Are you serious? sysvinit's modular architecture allows an easy substitution with other alternatives, that's why you can replace it with say systemd and have a working system.

This is not true, unless you happen to have too many dollars to spare. Also, Windows can also be forked, by distributing patches instead of binaries.

If you need to advance exactly 50 pages, the worst thing there is from a usability perspective is to press PageDown 50 times, instead of clicking 5 times with progressive pagination or inputing the number in other traditional designs.

pinterest, facebook or twitter are whole-content streams, that's why they benefit from infinite scroll.