From: James Powell [mailto:james4591@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2015 12:27 PM
To: T.J. Duchene
Subject: RE: [DNG] systemd in wheezy, was: Re: bummer



I think if Devuan can break the dependency, it can prove more than most people realize.



We will certainly see, and it would be nice.





The overreliance on systemd on any form has left things as they are. If vdev can effectively replace udev, rather than offer an alternative that doesn't do everything and is limited, then we break a huge chain holding down not just Devuan but all distributions.



If you don’t mind, I’d like to elucidate a bit further in what I see.


The management of many of the binary distributions has fallen to groups of people rather obsessed with driving Linux as a competitor to Windows. This has long been an obsession of theirs, for decades in fact, and they see it as the end goal. Things like systemd are stepping stones down that road because they are – whether consciously or not – feel the need to drive the design of Linux down the same path that Windows took all those years ago. Systemd is in many ways, a clone of a part of Windows called SVCHOST. Actually, systemd concerns me very little because in the grand scheme of things, it is really just a minor annoyance. As many have said, there are plenty of alternatives to using systemd.



What does concern me is that this same attitude has developed a popular mindset named FLOS (Free Linux Operating System) rather than FOSS. FOSS wants open standards or contributing to the UNIX community as a whole. FLOS believes that Linux IS the community and that those wonderful things that gave Linux its success, such as POSIX, no longer matter. Everyone should follow Linux’s lead, wherever that goes or be damned. In essence, it is exactly the same attitude that Microsoft developed after they became the most popular, and now Linux has fallen prey to the same diseased thinking, which makes Linux less compatible with everyone else by the day.



I’d ask that you trust me on this. I’ve seen it firsthand as a programmer for the last 25+ years. I don’t think there are any quick antidotes either. I think that Linux will either realize the error the majority are making or they won’t. We all know what happened to Microsoft. Usually, it takes getting burned before people realize they screwed up.