On Mon, 2 Feb 2015 11:47:28 -0600
"T.J. Duchene" <t.j.duchene@???> wrote:

> Funny thing. I hear a lot of complaining about systemd, and yes, i
> think some of it is justified, but consider this...Rather than
> joining the project and steering it in another direction, or creating
> patches to fix what you do not like, everyone is just standing about
> complaining. Now this is not to say that Devuan is sitting on its
> hands.

If five hundred of us joined the systemd project, it wouldn't change
even one of our major objections, for the following reasons:

* Systemd's foundational design is bad
* It's led by Poettering, whose ego prevails
* There's too much bad about systemd to ever fix
* Many of us believe Red Hat has a financial stake in screwing up Linux
* Every minute contributed to systemd is a minute stolen from the likes
of vdev and many other softwares and techniques to make a good,
modular, DIYable OS.

"Why don't you work from the inside to fix it" is a phrase as old as
the hills, usually spoken by those enjoying the status quo. Imagine if
Martin Luther King had run for congress instead of leading the Civil
Rights Marches. What if Gandhi had run for Parliament instead of
leading a nation in nonviolent civil disobedience? Maybe Linus should
have worked with Tannenbaum to make Minix better.

You mention "everyone is just standing about complaining" and I have
two responses:

1) Not true
2) Sometimes complaining is a good thing

We're not just complaining. A large number of people have made inroads,
in several different ways, to ensure a future where systemd is not
manditory. Oh, we complain while we do that, but we're doing it. You
were on the Debian-User list in September, so you saw the morose
futility coupled with livid anger. Look at the world just four months
later: We have many, many alternatives today, including a whole project
bringing in a systemd free Debian.

Secondly, sometimes complaining is a good thing. Every social change,
and life without systemd *is* a social change, begins with complaints.
Remember in early 2014 when those of us on Debian-User but not on the
developers list had bad feelings about systemd, but thought we were the
only one? Later that year, we found each other through complaining,
formed a community by complaining, and when we had critical mass, we
went elsewhere and competed with the status quo.

In fact, Linux' success began in a universe of complaining about
Windows. Linux would have been nothing more or less than a cool Geek
project, sort of like Raspberry Pi, were it not for the voluminous mid
to late 1990's complaints about Windows. A chunk of us went to Linux en
masse, and that's how Linux invaded big iron shops, in the guise of
Samba servers and email servers and the like.

In summary, complaining is a natural outgrowth of systemd, and has had
the positive effects of coalescing a community to make systemd
unnecessary, and in doing so, spawned a whole new generation of folks
who understand OS underpinnings and write software to keep those
underpinnings sane. Diverting such enthusiasm to helping with the
systemd project would be counterproductive.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance