Re: Lennart Poettering Leaves Redhat for Microsoft
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name at domain wrote:
> With Lennart Poettering now employed at Microsoft does anybody feel that it gives
> more reason to not trust SystemD seeing as a company such as Microsoft signs his
> cheques now and therefore may have a lot of influence on the project ?
I do not.
System D remains free software regardless of where its original developer works. Even
if Poettering holds the sole copyright to all System D code and signed that copyright
over to Microsoft, Microsoft can't stop us from continuing to treat already-released
System D software as free software.
The audience receptive to some anti-System D message is conflating a free software
program with the history of Microsoft. Objections to System D on technical grounds
are a separate matter.
>"The audience receptive to some anti-System D message is conflating a free software program with the history of Microsoft."
I disagree. What many have said for quite a few years is that systemd seems to have big project goals and project management style that are like the way Microsoft runs their big projects. People have complained about its goals and the project's management style without losing sight of the fact that it's still freely licensed.
We've had a lot of large projects like that over the years. When is the last time you met someone that preferred to use OpenOffice over Libreoffice? It's practically unheard of, because of the way that OpenOffice is mismanaged. But you can still download it and run it if you want. Mismanagement and lack of proper goals doesn't make it proprietary.
Xorg itself is a bigger project than systemd that has even suffered from abandonment in recent years, and had to be given a caretaker to revive some much needed releases for it. No one is arguing that it's not freely licensed, but its management and project goals have been a bit of a mess in recent years.
name at domain wrote:
> I disagree. What many have said for quite a few years is that systemd seems to have
> big project goals and project management style that are like the way Microsoft runs
> their big projects. People have complained about its goals and the project's
> management style without losing sight of the fact that it's still freely licensed.
Your rebuttal reads to me as a different conflation -- software freedom and how a
program is organized or managed, which are all separate issues. Software freedom
offers anyone willing to do the work a means to resolve the matter. These other
matters don't make systemd any less trustworthy for me, as was originally asked.
I can't speak to what complaints you refer to. You cite none and quote none. Software
freedom offers a practical means to remedy what is perceived as a problem -- fork the
free software and comply with free program's license. This is how LibreOffice came to
be; LibreOffice started as an OpenOffice fork.
> Software freedom offers a practical means to remedy what is perceived as a problem -- fork the free software and comply with free program's license.
This is indeed how it works in most cases. In some scenarios it is being argued that this is practically unachievable (or at least unreasonably expensive) due to given project's complexity. Besides Systemd, the we could also consider Tianocore[1] and web browsers[2] to be examples of this problem.
Now, opinions matter whether this is really a problem with respect to particular projects. It might happen that while certain group of people considers something not to be reasonably forkable, some other group makes an attempt and succeeds in making and keeping up a good fork. Or it might fail and prove the first group was right after all.
This conflict of opinions is what we observe with Systemd. Personally, I believe it is not necessary to avoid Systemd at all cost but it is good to have some other init options available in case something goes wrong
[1] https://trisquel.info/en/forum/installing-system-nonlibreboot-computer-such-it-works-libreboot-computer#comment-163680
[2] https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html
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