Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

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Debian isn't really a leader. They're more of a passive target platform and their committee has people from various strokes of the Linux community. As such, RH decisions with significant influence definitely would impact them. Ubuntu, in turn, is symbiotic with Debian, though still quite forked from it in most aspects beyond the packaging infrastructure (now with Snappy diverging even further). Nonetheless, Unity needs GNOME and Canonical are still a small player who are perfectly capable of foreseeing future trends. Adopting systemd is the path of least resistance and will help them track Debian's packages better.

Most RPM-based distros (openSUSE included) tend to follow RH's direction, so that's not surprising. Besides, SUSE has always been enthusiastic about most desktop efforts.

Arch Linux have at least two systemd developers on their team (Tom Gundersen and Dave Reisner). In fact, it was tomegun who wrote the Arch migration rationale: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530, based on the usual fallacious arguments (http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fall...).

Also, distros have blindly went along with other bad ideas before. The most prominent examples were HALd and LSB-style initscripts.

In fact, I'm not sure why you're at all surprised. Large groups of people in real life have collectively made far, far more catastrophic decisions. Why would a bunch of distribution maintainers adopting a piece of software be so shocking?

Systemd is pointing out the truth about lots of "emperor's clothes" in the current Linux ecosystem.

When there were problems about a desktop manager revamp or some crashy audio daemon, you could liquidate certain choices as irrelevant or lazy. Now the entire ecosystem's guts are being rewritten by RedHat for RedHat, and the developer community is simply going along because, in practice, they have no other choice. Nobody else has the appetite, the manpower or the political weight to put together a competing project with a single chance of success.

When chips are down, Red Hat owns Linux more than we like to admit.

I suspect many didn't see it coming because systemd was under the freedesktop.org umbrella rather than a Red Hat fronted project.

Thing is though that while freedesktop.org is presented as being about cooperation and compatibility between desktop environments, a very large portion of what happens there is dictated by Gnome.

And Gnome is yet another project that on paper is independent, but with big RH contributions in terms of programming manpower (its the primary DE of both Fedora and RHEL).

Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things.

> Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things.

This. The whole Linux community seems to be paranoid. It has to be a grand scheme, a plot to take over Linux, a conspiracy to kill "the UNIX way". Maybe it's just a group of guys solving their problems.

I don't see how anything of this is really Red Hat's "fault". Seriously. They develop a piece of software which solves their problems. They also incorporate projects they already maintain to improve functionality and make developing things easier. It's their projects, they're allowed to do that. The code is still open. It's not like everybody (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc) didn't have the ability to fork udev.

Yet all these projects chose not to fork the projects incorporated by systemd. Reason (1) might be it solves problems for them as well. There's no need to fork something that perfectly works for you. Reason (2) might be they don't have the resources. But that's a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole "Linux is built by community volunteers" thing. The people advising against "corporate influence" are not able to do anything of value in modern computing anymore (I'm well aware this is over-simplification, please bear with me). Requirements for software have changed. It's not 1970 anymore. And while the "old-school" users and devs are complaining about systemd & co, the "youngsters" are busy changing the ecosystem.

> (2) might be they don't have the resources. But that's a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole "Linux is built by community volunteers" thing.

May well be the case.

Somewhere GregKH mentioned how the pace of kernel development had changed, with git being a major part of it.

It may well be that the pace have now gotten to the point where hobbyists have a hard time keeping up, as they have things they need to do besides stare at code all day.

This has been the case for some time now, but the ecosystem of large-ish companies was diverse enough as to avoid appearing dominated by this or that player. The fall of Novell and Nokia, coupled with Ubuntu's various pivots and IBM's troubles, left Red Hat as the lone real force with the capability to steer the most significant projects.

This is nobody's fault, but it's not healthy in the long run.

> It may well be that the pace have now gotten to the point where hobbyists have a hard time keeping up, as they have things they need to do besides stare at code all day.

Totally agree. The needs of modern computing (server-, desktop- and security-wise) have drastically increased IMHO. You need to read so much documentation and existing code before you can even start coding. That's just not feasible in your free time after work if you're having an active social life or another computer-unrelated hobby.

Although I have to admit I might be biased about this topic. I'm contributing to a FOSS project which got a lot of flak for trying to raise money for employees in a ... well, more aggressive way. While not necessarily agreeing with everything that happened, I do believe you need to work full-time on modern FOSS projects to push ahead.

This is Too Big To Fork https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259 at work. Any legally free-slash-open-source software project which is so complex that only a few big actors have the will and ability to make and maintain a fork is de facto under the shared proprietary control of those big actors. (The same goes for software where control of the installed base means de facto control over any changes to widely-used interfaces.) "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." The Linux 'ecosystem' is only unusual in that (as it seems) there's exactly one big actor left standing by now.

> Debian isn't really a leader. They're more of a passive target platform and their committee has people from various strokes of the Linux community.

This is so not true that it is bordering on FUD. Systemd's leadership depended on debian making a fairly democratic, open and violently fought battle between upstart vs systemd. Everyone knew that Ubuntu (which is pretty much defacto installed in every laptop sold in Asia) would adopt systemd based on Debian's decision.

It was an argument that went on for a year. Read it for yourself if you want - https://bugs.debian.org/727708

Not only did Debian make the decision to support systemd, it voted to NOT support other init systems. Mark Shuttleworth made his announcement the day after (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 ).

It is an interesting position to take by painting systemd as the lackey of a capitalist monopoly trying to take over the world. I can see how that can get a lot of mindshare. The truth is far simpler - systemd is far superior.

Your comment gets it mostly right, except:

> Not only did Debian make the decision to support systemd, it voted to NOT support other init systems.

This is incorrect: systemd was merely voted as the default init system, other init systems are explicitly supported, here's the TC decision:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/08/msg00...

point taken.

actually, I was referring to https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003 . But I see how my language could be interpreted that way.

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