[jle17]

> I don't trust Poetteringware. Poettering's team has a record of foisting technology on users, resulting in the need for e.g. the Devuan fork.

They have been developing software, that enough people have deemed useful to include it in their distributions. Some have disagreed, and have made other choices. No one was forced to do anything, there have been no "foisting" and the "need" for Devuan is a subjective opinion.

There is really no need to transform purely technical arguments into personal attacks. This just discourages participating into free software development.

[lmm]

Systemd was designed in a way that was more tightly coupled than the alternatives and made adopting it an all-or-nothing proposition, and other projects (particularly Gnome) were also tightly coupled to it. It was absolutely foisted on people: a lot of people didn't want it but found they were nevertheless obliged to install it. The whole thing abused the goodwill of the free software community: systemd folks added systemd-dependent patches to other software, taking advantage of the norm of accepting such contributions, while refusing patches that made systemd compatible with other systems (e.g. non-Linux). And the end result was a state where you can no longer fork and replace components piecemeal - the whole free software ethos, the very reason GNU was built as a Unix-like system in the first place - which does far more to discourage participating in free software development than any mere internet argument.

[jle17]

The tight coupling, the non-portability, all of that are technical choices, that can be debated on their own merit without the need to attribute malevolent intentions to the developers.

Projects merged changes because they wanted them, not because their goodwill was abused to make them merge anything. People got systemd on their OSes because they chose OSes whose developers chose to move to systemd.

It's not like Lennart comes to your home with a gun if you install OpenBSD.

[dogleash]

> all of that are technical choices, that can be debated on their own merit without the need to attribute malevolent intentions to the developers

The ramifications of those technical choices on the software ecosystem are so well understood [0], that there is no point in discussing "their own merits" in a vacuum.

What's most relevant to my professional and waning hobbyist interests are the shape and trajectory of the software ecosystem as a whole. To talk about systemd without talking about how it's developers interact with the software ecosystem is to talk about nothing.

[0] I graduated before systemd was a glint in Pottering's eye, but we somehow still covered it in school. Not only coupling vs cohesion in the abstract, but also how various design decisions (including init system arguments of old!) interacted with the ebb and flow of unix-like OS evolution.

[lmm]

> The tight coupling, the non-portability, all of that are technical choices, that can be debated on their own merit

They can't. GNU was a political project from day 1, with explicitly political goals; the unix-like design is for political, not technical, reasons.

> Projects merged changes because they wanted them, not because their goodwill was abused to make them merge anything.

Citation needed. If you maintain a widely-used open-source project there's a pretty strong social norm/pressure to merge contributions that don't have anything obviously wrong with them, even if the functionality they implement is something you don't actually want or need.

> People got systemd on their OSes because they chose OSes whose developers chose to move to systemd.

Because they chose OSes whose non-technical leadership chose to move to systemd, in violation of the project constitution, and then had the rump technical committee rubber-stamp it once the principled technical leadership had resigned in disgust and the decision was already a fait accompli, the way I remember it.

> It's not like Lennart comes to your home with a gun if you install OpenBSD.

Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. No, Lennart won't hack into your computer with an SSH exploit, but he'll get the software you're using (like Gnome) to push updates that stop it working on your computer, and so the end result ends up much the same.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

> There is really no need to transform purely technical arguments into personal attacks. This just discourages participating into free software development.

While I agree with you in general, for some reason this particular developer tends to take decisions that have very extensive consequences and make choice extremely difficult.

[kevincox]

A developer that has been able to make tough choices and drive them well enough to get mass adoption?

He definitely isn't perfect but this sounds like quite the feat in Open Source.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

There is a huge difference between a developer who creates a superior project that everybody loves to use so it gets mass adoption and one who makes a product that gets pushed by their employer on everyone whether they want it or not. I don't want to get into details as the subject has been beaten to death but as for Systemd* there was the case of integration with graphical login that made choice difficult. Had the author been more sensitive to this issue and cooperated a bit without being stubborn we wouldn't have had Devuan and all that mess. This is exactly NOT the way to do things in open source.

*PulseAudio was simply broken but it's not the fault of the author distros picked up aplha-quality software

[growse]

> This is exactly NOT the way to do things in open source.

Someone made a decision, others didn't like it so forked. Sounds like open source is working exactly as it should?

[hdjjhhvvhga]

For applications, tools, even most libraries - yes. But this was one of the critical elements of the system and they had to fork the entire distro because the way it was done actually made the choice more limited.

[Foxboron]

>But this was one of the critical elements of the system and they had to fork the entire distro because the way it was done actually made the choice more limited.

This isn't very accurate. When Debian decided to switch to systemd, they also agreed to support other inits in the distribution.

This wasn't good enough, so Devuan itself was forked before this decision was made. The end result is that Debian had less people to support the init script alternatives. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I'm confident Debian could support other inits if there was more Debian devs available to work on it. But because people left for Devuan the pool becomes smaller.

Even the last decision on inits from Debian says that the focus should not solely be on systemd.

https://lwn.net/Articles/808217/

[biorach]

> a product that gets pushed by their employer on everyone whether they want it or not.

Highly inaccurate

[kasabali]

> A developer that has been able to make arbitrary choices and drive them thorough his employers connections to get mass adoption

FTFY

[denton-scratch]

I didn't make a personal attack on Poettering; my objection is to the software his team produces. And I wasn't making any technical argument; I don't know enough about TPM and secure boot to do that.

My point was a political one, I guess: this is more software that runs very deep in the system, coming from a team that has a record of producing software that is hard to opt-out of.

For PulseAudio on Debian, you have to take firm steps to ensure the package manager doesn't reinstall it. Much the same goes for systemd. I assume it will be much harder to opt-out of a secure boot released by that team. I believe that's on purpose: they could have made it easier to run without those packages, if they'd wanted to. I think it's clear that they wanted the opposite.

[carapace]

You are completely missing the point.

Please don't fan this flame.