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by pipy 4504 days ago
Systemd is controlled by Red Hat in a way in which critical system components including kernel haven't been controlled before. Not by single corporate entity.

That's what we know about this company from an old (2007) article:

> “When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open

> source,” General Justice continued. “It may come as a

> surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is “the” single

> largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer.” [1]

It is better to go with a grass-roots solution, even the one technically inferior, that isn't being influenced by one single vendor or government (especially the one that has a tendency to indiscriminately infect other people's systems [2]).

Also, the Interface Stability Promise [3] by systemd team is just a promise, nothing more. Will Red Hat keep it if it is to decide at some point, that it no longer serves it's bottom line? I wonder if it can be considered legally binding.

[1] http://archive09.linux.com/feed/61302

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vILAlhwUgIU

[3] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfaceSt...

Originally posted in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210064

2 comments

You do understand that systemd is open source, right? If they decide to leverage their "control" into something the rest of the community doesn't like, we fork it.
> If they decide to leverage their "control" into something the rest of the community doesn't like, we fork it.

I hope so. My concern is that when we'll see systemd grow in size and more and more software depend on it's interfaces and components (as in GNOME with logind) at the certain point it could take an insurmountable amount of resources to maintain the fork. At this point it might be easier to give up on Linux and build around some other kernel and userland, I hope this will never happen, though.

Also, there is a difference between steering the developments in the preferred direction and outright destructive actions. As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog.

Interesting. Most of my work with Systemd has been via CoreOS, which is linked to GregKH, who was actually a SuSE dude.