On 02/04/2015 03:03 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
>>>> Is not ISIL a better analogy?
>
> But not the analogy I was driving at. The Taliban is a movement that
> started focused on Afghanistan - a revolutionary movement. ISIL's
> mission is to (re)establish an Islamic Caliphate over a broad swatch of
> territory (kind of like the Borg). The later seems a lot more like what
> is happening with systemd.
>
> Miles Fidelman
>
>

The "Islamic Caliphate" and the general media attention of ISIL seem to
me to respond to an ideological warfare painted in Samuel Huntington's
1996 opus "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order".

Honestly, considering "The West" and "Islam(ism)" as monolithic entities
fighting each other is a bit like confusing porn with eroticism, or
McDonald's with food -- or war with peace.

This heavy tendency of "Western" ideologists and mass media to draw
subtle portraits with chainsaws and bulldozers is not at all helpful
neither in understanding the phenomenon of the rise of ISIL in the
Middle-East nor to understand the various forms of Islam, nor to
understand each other as human beings, and of course it does not help
bringing a sane view of complexity.

I like Poettering's own choice of the Borg, because it illustrates the
contradiction and paradox of his real-fictional action. Systemd is
doing to the free software world what Microsoft was doing in its time to
the computer world: it pushes the incentives of "progress", in the sense
of fugue, to wrap a monolithic construct (Linux) with a monolithic shell
(systemd) that will do it all and better than anyone else just because,
please don't ask, you should know.

Yes, the Borg. An invasive, unavoidable plague that will make its way
like a caries down to the core of an aching tooth. I've seen the
presentation with all the Borg illustrations, and frankly, I thought on
some slides: how is that an advantage? Certainly Mr. Poettering is in
love with his own mind and logic, but I would certainly not appreciate
his poetry.

The concept of "Pensée Unique", the "unique train of thought" that is
delivered year after year by the all powerful "too big to fail" Western
ideology has brought its heavy muddy boots into the free software world.
That most of distributions adopted systemd however remains less a sign
of quality and engineering prowess than a mix of developer laziness,
good marketing, and general short-sightedness -- remember SSL is still
around, and there's nothing worse than a bad idea whose time has come.

That said, I wish the Devuan community-in-the-making would bring to a
halt the criticism of Systemd and especially when it comes to demonizing
it and making hardly appropriate comparisons, and start focusing on how
we can make the best *universal* free software operating system that is
not stuck in monomania, in bureaucracy, nor in the 1990s (although it
should definitely be working on HDDs as well).

Regards,

==
hk

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