On Sat, 23 May 2015 07:29:56 +0000
toki <toki.kantoor@???> wrote:

>
>
> On 23/05/2015 05:18, James Powell wrote:
> > True, but developers are banding together to resist this as well,
> > and fork projects as needed.
>
> But what happens when one has to fork everything from Firefox to
> Enkive to Hadoop to Tryton?

In a word, boycott.

Xfce is starting to get too entangled, so I use Openbox. If Openbox
gets snared, I'll go to dwm. If firefox becomes entangled, I'll move to
xxxterm or one of the other "light" browsers. If those get entangled,
I'll use a text browser for most things, and a containerized GUI
browser for the remainder.

We work with free software, and pay no money for it, but maintaining
*our* standards for what goes on our boxes is anything but free. We,
and I mean we as a user community, not necessarily we as a distro, need
to scale back our expectations, work harder, be more innovative, be
flexible in changing our work habits to accommodate less-dependencied
software. The person who "simply must" work a certain way and will not
consider changing to adapt when his pet software goes entangled, will
not survive in owner-maintainable software, and must join those who
gleefully add locked computers to their locked phones.

You know when I knew Devuan had it right? When Devuan declined to
support Gnome. Declined to jump through ever increasing hoops to
depoetterize ever more sabotaged software, but instead basically said
"hey, if you're so in love with Gnome that it's a must have, then
Devuan is the wrong place for you."

If Tryton demands systemd, find a different ERP. If Hadoop demands
systemd, find a different big data system. If Firefox (which isn't the
the most stable program anyway) requires systemd, use xxxterm or
whatever. If Enkive requires systemd, find something else to do
whatever email machinations Enkive does. And when I say "different", I
specifically include commercially licensed software, because vendor
lockin is vendor lockin, whether by contract or by complexity ruling
out owner maintenance. If it weren't for PC-BSD, Manjaro-OpenRC and
Devuan, I'd be using a Mac today. Once I can't fix/modify my own
possessions, does it really matter whether it's free software or not?

If every consumer walked away from bad deals like systemd requirements,
such bad deals would wither on the vine. We've come together as a
community to make a systemd-free distro. That's half the job. The other
half is each of us, as consumers, saying goodbye to those programs that
decide it would be [hip|easier|necessary] to enmesh with V'jer. If
enough of us do that and publicise it enough, "upstreams" might think
twice before walking happily into their assimilation.

By the way, for that one app that's absolutely business critical with
absolutely no substitute, the consumer can use a container, so we
don't have to put ourselves out of business to do this.

SteveT

Steve Litt
May 2015 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz