> systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom"
This is absolutely incorrect. We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it. I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd. (To which the response from the systemd folks was something along the lines of "You shouldn't be turning it off anyways")
(Great, now our software takes philosophical positions...)
Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about.
Meanwhile, in the real world, populated by end users and sysadmins, the most important people when it comes to a computing environment, the ones that all of this crap is being done for at the end of the day... not so much.
sigh
I'm annoyed that systemd is taking over for political reasons and not purely on its technical merits, and that there is no way this is not going to lead to a monoculture. There will be others, but they will be relegated to the position of marginalized, niche players that nobody outside of /g/ troll threads care about.
I'm annoyed that the rest of the world is going to have to adapt to this software, rather than the other way around.
I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do.
> We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it.
Wow... we've come a long way baby! Now freely available software that you can modify as needed without interference is taking away your freedom! ;-)
> I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd.
Actually, the problem is that if you load IPv6 support after a socket was created, there's no efficient way to make that existing socket compatible with IPv6, which of course creates a nasty little integration problem. That wasn't a choice of the systemd folks, that was a choice of how the kernel folks organized their network subsystem & modules.
Systemd runs fine on my system with no IPv6 support.
> Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about.
For all the complaining about NIH syndrome and absorbing other projects for political purposes, systemd actually builds on top of a lot of very well established components (dbus, udev, etc.). To the extent that software gets tightly coupled with it, it wouldn't be hard to change it so that it used those standard components without systemd... unless systemd is actually providing some unique advantages for that software that you can't live without. In which case... go out and do a better job of it!
> I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do.
Call it flexibility, then. I don't think you can reasonably deny that a package that requires major surgery to work with a different init system is less flexible than one that simply doesn't care, even if said surgery is perfectly legal with the source available. That flexibility is a large part of why a lot of us came to Linux, and regardless of whether it's technically "freedom", losing it feels like losing freedom.
> I don't think you can reasonably deny that a package that requires major surgery to work with a different init system is less flexible than one that simply doesn't care, even if said surgery is perfectly legal with the source available.
I think you'll find that it isn't nearly that difficult a problem to address. For all kinds of reasons, just like every other system design that has come before it, there will need to be accommodations made to work with other stuff. Its not like the old code just disappears overnight. You can't succeed as a new platform without a way of working with the old (and again, you've mostly been sold a bill of goods... most of systemd's architecture is the old system).
> That flexibility is a large part of why a lot of us came to Linux, and regardless of whether it's technically "freedom", losing it feels like losing freedom.
If it feels like losing freedom to you, you don't know what that is about. You're losing someone writing code the way you wanted them to. That's not losing freedom. That's getting it.
According to your definition of "freedom", Microsoft Windows is just as Free as Linux. After all, Microsoft gives you the "source code" on the CD itself! All you have to do is start flipping bits here and there, and...
Wait, what's that? Editing compiler-generated assembly code is too hard for you? Well, that's clearly your problem, since you can't expect Microsoft to bend over backwards and write code for you the way you wanted it!
> According to your definition of "freedom", Microsoft Windows is just as Free as Linux. After all, Microsoft gives you the "source code" on the CD itself! All you have to do is start flipping bits here and there, and...
Wha?
> Wait, what's that? Editing compiler-generated assembly code is too hard for you? Well, that's clearly your problem, since you can't expect Microsoft to bend over backwards and write code for you the way you wanted it!
Umm. no. That's Microsoft bending over backwards NOT to give you the source code, as defined very clearly by the FSF and the OSD.
More importantly, in the case of Microsoft's proprietary software (they do actually have some open source stuff which isn't encumbered like this), it's literally a violation of their license agreement for you to edit that code yourself.
Am I through the looking glass or am I being trolled?
Free software means you can't restrict anyone from going ahead and making whatever changes they might want to to software, distributing it to the world, and potentially garnering mindshare in the process.
If there's one thing I've learned about FOSS, it's that everyone is looking for an excuse to fork things. Linux will never develop a monoculture - because someone can and will fork it. How many distributions are there? desktop environments? Package managers? Text editors and IDEs? And even zooming out of linux, there's openBSD, freeBSD, etc; If you start yelling about monoculture, isn't sysv init the worst offender for that? We have less monocultures than ever before.
If you think freedom is the ability to run only the code you want, the only way you're ever going to get freedom is by writing everything from scratch. Software will never be exactly the way you want it to be unless you write it yourself.
Most software depends on other software. That's just how things work. GNOME is particularly bad offender for that - it installed apache for some reason last time I used it. But GNOME also does a lot of things I don't really need it to do. Maybe someone else uses those features, and that's OK. You can switch DE if you really don't like systemd that much. But if you don't, that's not denying you your freedom - you made a decision about the benefits and drawbacks of a product, and decided to use that product.
Nobody really says how systemd only took over for political reasons, there's just random posts on forums that make claims and link to some dude's podcast. There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious.
I think systemd is the wrong choice for debian/ubuntu. But there's no reason to badmouth people about it and say hurtful things. Just use something else.
The systemd people and Lennart in particular are very open about their contempt for anything that isn't Linux + systemd and their intent to shove whatever they want down everybody's throats regardless of bugs or breakage, and blame everyone but themselves for what their shit breaks.
This can't be dressed up as anything but malicious.
This is absolutely incorrect. We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it. I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd. (To which the response from the systemd folks was something along the lines of "You shouldn't be turning it off anyways")
(Great, now our software takes philosophical positions...)
Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about.
Meanwhile, in the real world, populated by end users and sysadmins, the most important people when it comes to a computing environment, the ones that all of this crap is being done for at the end of the day... not so much.
sigh
I'm annoyed that systemd is taking over for political reasons and not purely on its technical merits, and that there is no way this is not going to lead to a monoculture. There will be others, but they will be relegated to the position of marginalized, niche players that nobody outside of /g/ troll threads care about.
I'm annoyed that the rest of the world is going to have to adapt to this software, rather than the other way around.
I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do.