Will systemd make FreeBSD more popular?

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Originally quoted as from another forum (not named, though).

This reminds me of Microsoft paying De Icaza to attack Linux from the inside with the Mono trojan horse. Now, it is Red Hat (no doubt directed by their customer Fed Gov) directly attacking the simple, modular, do-one-thing-right Unix design philosophy and replacing it with the far-reaching, metastatizing blob that is SystemD. Why? To bake-in impossible to find, intentional backdoors and vulnerabilities as designed by Poettering and the rest of his paid-off coven.

No, this isn't directed by the federal government. There is no benefit to the government. This isn't Windows with its proprietary code. It is still open source with thousands of eyes upon it.

RH has huge contracts to supply Linux software to the feds, with support, which is where the big money comes in. A large percentage of those contracts are with the military. The last thing the military wants is an OS with backdoors, especially when the developers are scattered around the globe. Poettering is in Germany, for example.

It is more likely that RH is trying to lock down future federal Linux contracts by "engineering" a semi-proprietary version of Linux that they control or effectively control. Support contracts almost always require a demonstration of in-depth subject knowledge by the bidder's employees. RH can simply say we know that intimately, we wrote it. That would put them in the catbird seat for future contracts, essentially guaranteeing they would get the work.

It's about the money, as usual.
 
Why are you on these forums if you equate "controlled by one group" with deliberate obfuscation and vendor lock-in?
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I think I said that an OS controlled by one group tends to be more coherent, and that a proprietary OS tends to have deliberate obfuscation and vendor lock-in.

Proprietary OSes are controlled by one group, but not all OSes that are controlled by one group are proprietary.
 
usrslashpeople said:
I have been a Linux engineer/admin for too many years. I was never excited about Linux. I grew up with IRIX and still use an Octane2 (with green skins) as my main system for doing any work in the terminal (which is most of what I do).
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+1 for old Irix guy. My first work station after moving to U.S. was Indy :) OpenBSD runs pretty well on SGI hardware these days. I have Octane 2 in my garage due to the fact that power supply died few years back and never bother to fix it. Once I almost purchased Origin 3000 (no OpenBSD doesn't run on that one) but my wife threaten me with the divorce so I had to pass on the best find of my life.
 
walterbyrd said:
I think I said that an OS controlled by one group tends to be more coherent, and that a proprietary OS tends to have deliberate obfuscation and vendor lock-in.

Proprietary OSes are controlled by one group, but not all OSes that are controlled by one group are proprietary.
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Ok, I agree with that. It seemed to me you were using proprietary and "controlled by one group" interchangeably before.
 
Oko said:
+1 for old Irix guy. My first work station after moving to U.S. was Indy :) OpenBSD runs pretty well on SGI hardware these days. I have Octane 2 in my garage due to the fact that power supply died few years back and never bother to fix it. Once I almost purchased Origin 3000 (no OpenBSD doesn't run on that one) but my wife threaten me with the divorce so I had to pass on the best find of my life.
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IRIX still has a community developed package list, so I don't bother running OpenBSD or NetBSD on the boxen I have. Also, I have a spare Octane PSU I don't mind sending you for the cost of postage. If you're interested just PM me ;). Shame about the O3000 though.
 
TeamBlackFox said:
Oh hello! Another IRIX user! I have an Octane2 with blue skins, an Origin 300 server, and an Indy I want to use for N64 debugging when I can find the kit.

I agree with much of what you said, but I'm mostly OpenBox, CDE and such guy. Love the username too ^o^.
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Used to rock the FreeBSD version of CDE before switching to Fluxbox myself. Apparently they've fixed alot of the annoyances I had with old CDE. I'll have to check it out again.
 
Fluxbox is okay, but I like OpenBox better because its faster and it actually works with bgs and the rest of my suite I use currently very well. CDE is still pretty damn nice though.
 
TeamBlackFox said:
Fluxbox is okay, but I like OpenBox better because its faster and it actually works with bgs and the rest of my suite I use currently very well. CDE is still pretty damn nice though.
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Well one of the reasons for Fluxbox is because I found matching themes for it and GTK2 (nimbus), been using it like that for a couple of years now. :)
 
I don't know if anybody else is seeing this stuff on twitter:
FreeBSD Help ‏@FreeBSDHelp 11h11 hours ago
RT @_fl0ss: @Sneakernets Surely systemd is the only excuse you need? Install FreeBSD and prosper.
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FreeBSD Help ‏@FreeBSDHelp 14h14 hours ago
Plan an #InstallFreeBSD Event in your area! A Call to Action by Trollaxor http://www.trollaxor.com/2015/02/call-to-action-plan-installfreebsd-event.html … #March30
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Here is the call to action:
trollaxor.com

Feb 10, 2015

Call to Action: Plan an #InstallFreeBSD Event
Hello.

I am putting out a call for individuals to organize #installFreeBSD events in their locales. The purpose of these events is to increase awareness of our favorite operating system because it's worth knowing about and using.

The events should be planned ahead of time and open to the public to maximize the impact of sharing FreeBSD with the wider world. It would be great to use a shared agenda that will allow each event to engage its participants in an intentional but leave room for flexibility.

These events should take place the evening of Wednesday, April 1 week of Monday, March 30.¹ It's about six weeks away, which allows plenty of time to collaborate on putting these together.

Here are my plans so far:

Invite:

local 2600 group (attend)
local Linux User Group (attend)
local TEDx mailing list (grab from them)
local hackerspace (attend/get list)
university comp sci dept/profs?
statwide cons?
Promotion:

promote event at above meetings, interested people sign up
send a few emails over the course of the next several weeks to my list
talk to presidents/profs/etc of other groups about same
Venue:

local hackerspace will allow us to host 30 people comfortably
will bring its regular members, make our event its meeting night
some computers already available
booked for April 1 5-9pm
Who is on your invitation list and where will you host your guests? What do you want in the agenda, and who wants to work on it together? Reply here and share your plans!

Sincerely,
Grant

P.S. If you're on Facebook or Twitter, use #InstallFreeBSD.
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Carbide said:
It is more likely that RH is trying to lock down future federal Linux contracts by "engineering" a semi-proprietary version of Linux that they control or effectively control. Support contracts almost always require a demonstration of in-depth subject knowledge by the bidder's employees. RH can simply say we know that intimately, we wrote it. That would put them in the catbird seat for future contracts, essentially guaranteeing they would get the work.
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It may be about time that Stallman speaks up on this. But I fear he is in the same position as Linus, because they both are bound by their own mission statements. Nothing Red Hat is doing is against the GPL, but that licence has no clause to forbid you the creation of an abomination unto the great old ones (Wirth, Knuth, Dijkstra, ...) by turning software into an unholy mess. As long as it is cheaper to pay them for support than to switch your software over to something else, they win.

Red Hat does not need to claim rights to the source code, they would be very ill advised if they did try that. They would then also be responsible. They are heading to a position where they will be payed to keep the unholy mess they created from blowing up, while at the same point not being responsible for it. Brilliant. But that would then also mean that the GPL has (kind of) failed. That might be a little bit depressing for GPL advocates, to put it kindly. The next step would one day be to reach out to whoever depends on this setup and say "Nice application you have there. Would be a shame if something would happen to it, no? Want us to take care of the support?"

And that would be a very sad day indeed.
 
Crivens said:
It may be about time that Stallman speaks up on this. But I fear he is in the same position as Linus, because they both are bound by their own mission statements. Nothing Red Hat is doing is against the GPL, but that licence has no clause to forbid you the creation of an abomination unto the great old ones (Wirth, Knuth, Dijkstra, ...) by turning software into an unholy mess. As long as it is cheaper to pay them for support than to switch your software over to something else, they win.

Red Hat does not need to claim rights to the source code, they would be very ill advised if they did try that. They would then also be responsible. They are heading to a position where they will be payed to keep the unholy mess they created from blowing up, while at the same point not being responsible for it. Brilliant. But that would then also mean that the GPL has (kind of) failed. That might be a little bit depressing for GPL advocates, to put it kindly. The next step would one day be to reach out to whoever depends on this setup and say "Nice application you have there. Would be a shame if something would happen to it, no? Want us to take care of the support?"

And that would be a very sad day indeed.
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The GPL isn't business friendly, and as such it was bound to fail.
 
Beastie7 said:
The GPL isn't business friendly, and as such it was bound to fail.
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Thanks for that link. It helps to explain what Red Hat is doing.

Here is something else. A RH Sys Admin that I know very, very well, thinks RH also deliberately sucks at their support role, while providing deliberately inadequate open source docco. Their goal, again according to my Sys Admin source, is to drive as many of their business/enterprise users as possible into formal (read expensive) training courses, where the real docco is handed out. In essence, they are double dipping.
 
Beastie7 said:
The GPL isn't business friendly, and as such it was bound to fail.
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On the other side, if it was business friendly, it would already be belly up in the water. Business (and public corporations in special) are forced to be predatory. That link Beastie7 posted sums it up, but it should be of no surprise to anyone. I have seen (and suffered) actions driven by "shareholder value, shareholder value!!" calls, some of which threw promising new technology under the bus only to lengthen the current business models remaining run time. If you ever have a ground breaking idea, don't go to the stock exchange for money if you want it to succeed. This has cost humanity some hundred years worth of progress upto now, I would imagine.

Crivens said:
And that would be a very sad day indeed.
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This I need to correct, now that I had some sleep, into:
"And that will be a very sad day indeed."

There is no doubt, at least to me, that this is one day comming around.
 
Very interesting thread.

It is rather interesting that neither Stallman or Linus have weighted in on these massive changes in Linux. I am also somewhat surprised that this hasn't happened sooner. Linux is big and often the first choice for shops seeking to go "open source". It's popular with radicals, scientists and government agencies alike. It's too big of a tool not to control in the eyes of some.

Given this, it is quite refreshing to have the diversity that we have in BSD-land (Free, Net, Open, Dragonfly... and forks). The focus on clean engineering, avoidance of obfuscation, better license and preference for non-proprietary are well-appreciated hallmarks of the BSDs.

I couldn't imagine them being usurped in the same way that Linux is being driven into the ground.
 
gofer_touch said:
Very interesting thread.

It is rather interesting that neither Stallman or Linus have weighted in on these massive changes in Linux.
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Linus simply can't do anything. His responsibility ends at the syscall level, so to speak. They have the mission to keep everything running which, at one time, was able to run on the kernel.

It is GNU/Linux, and in the space between this the wedge is set. Should Linus speak up, he will not do anything to the situation other than lessening his impact factor because Red Hat and other stakeholders (there are more, I presume) will simply not listen. So his rant will evaporate, and he will only demonstrate that he is unable to do anything. A lot of his standing is the knowledge, his and of others, that he can do this. He can not fail this, he can not change this, so he will not try. Imagine some change to the Linux kernel which breaks systemd. There would simply be a regression ticket, and that's that. The kernel team can not lock them out.

Stallman has brought up the GPL, and he has no other lever to pull in this. The code is free, you can do anything with this. It is the complexity which is generated here that is the problem which makes you pay Red Hat for support. If anyone could do it, it would be valueless.

I would bet that Linus, Stallman, and a lot of others who do not speak up are pretty unhappy and disgusted with this whole situation. But there is little they can do.

I couldn't imagine them being usurped in the same way that Linux is being driven into the ground.
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*BSD do not have this attack vector of a gap between user land and kernel. And I can not stress this enough, the other point is the documentation. This has already been brought up. So, again, a big praise to the unsung heros and heroines who write documentation, manpages and who maintain them. When I call up the manpage for a kernel function and I get a good, current and helpfull description, I am so happy that this is the status we can enjoy. A lot of the stuff Red Hat could sell to the average *BSD user is not needed by them. Also, and here we have another discriminator, *BSD users prefer the style. They prefer engineering solutions and concepts. An attempt to force systemd down the throats of the lot here would raise arguments, hostility, arguments and rejection. And I come to realize that it is not FreeBSD that is damaged by this - it is the (desktop) applications which will start to depend on it. FreeBSD would be colateral damage.
 
Crivens took the words right out of my mouth. Here's the way I see it and how I'd be doing it if I forked FreeBSD. Since I'd start at least the first major release with just rc, I'd tell developers who came onto the project that my concerns do not lie in the big desktop environments. If they want KDE, or GNOME, that I'd give them the go-ahead to work on it, unless they were doing other things and that work started making other things fall behind. The reality is that for the big-3 desktop environments, KDE, XFCE and GNOME, its rapidly becoming less-feasible to keep them running on the BSDs. I'd put a priority on Lumina, CDE, and maybe Enlightenment staying portable. They're less bloated, and less dependent on the Linuxisms. The fact that I ran GNOME 2 for years without ConsoleKit, Polkit, d-bus, HAL, udev or any of this feature-creep proves the point that none of it is needed for a multiuser desktop system. I'd eventually switch the default to runit and build a few perl tools to port existing initscripts to runit. Runit is inline more with the BSD philosophy, and if rc is going to be obsoleted in the future, that's the init system I'd recommend. If nobody maintained KDE, GNOME or XFCE's compatibility with the project, I'd recommend their removal along with what dependencies we'd effectively not need at that point like Consolekit and D-BUS. Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice all do not need D-BUS to run. Chromium may, but I know few FreeBSD users who use it. The FreeDesktop project I have no interest in supporting their overengineered bullshit myself.
 
Carbide said:
Will systemd make FreeBSD more popular?

Apparently not to this systemD fan, who refers to BSDers as rapists (really). o_O

http://fossforce.com/2015/01/top-ten-things-linux-users-say-about-systemd/#comment-13820
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Scarlett is obviously not a people person, but she did get one thing right - spelling. The rest is not really worth commenting on. Anyway, that thread only highlights the confusion that arises from thinking that all people have the same needs and concerns in their life. Fundamentally, this discussion is not about systemd at all.

Of course there are many views and concerns and it really isn't a matter of two camps. But if I were to break it down that simply, I'd say there are those that are most concerned about having things done for them ("just works"), and those that like to have their own control over the system. These are two different concerns which can't be directly compared but which find an intersection in the systemd debate.
 
TeamBlackFox said:
Chromium may, but I know few FreeBSD users who use it. The FreeDesktop project I have no interest in supporting their overengineered bullshit myself.
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I wanted to mention one thing in regard to Chromium. While it isn't my favorite browser for a whole host of reasons (the locked down add on architecture in particular), right now it is the only way to have support for MSE DRM on FreeBSD. Some may say, well, just use Flash with Firefox. This is a big problem - Firefox is eventually going to retire NPAPI, meaning that option is going away (from what I understand, this is why work on Gnash stopped as well, it would be a plugin without a browser). At that point, if you want to watch a Youtube video in 1080p or use any other website that requires EME, you will have to try running the Windows version of Firefox via WINE or rely on Chromium. A real use case example, the website Snag Films can only be used on FreeBSD with HTML5 via Chromium. http://www.snagfilms.com/ There's also the issue of performance, where HTML5 with hardware acceleration in Chromium is much lighter than Flash in Firefox. I realize not everyone cares about this, but there are still valid uses for Chromium. I really doubt this will ever happen with Chromium though, as its "tier 1" platforms (Chrome OS and Android) rely on upstart and init.rc respectively.

On that note, the EFF published an article about EME this week. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/new-drm-boss-same-old-boss
 
Crivens said:
Cromium is another can of worms to deal with. That should not bother us right here and right now.
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I didn't mean to go too off topic there, I just wanted to nip any notion that Chrome/Chromium is moving in that direction in the bud before it got started. If anyone has been following what Google are up to with their own software/operating systems, systemd doesn't seem to be in their future, so any Google developed applications shouldn't be a concern or worth mentioning in terms of systemd's impact on FreeBSD ports.
 
retrogamer, Cromium is not completely off topic, as it surely has the same mechanisms working there. Some folks, when presented with something that is free, first look for a place to put their price tag on it. Sad, but true. I would not put too much hope into Google here. Their version of an init system would consist of a rcorder tool as a cloud based service so you could not start any device without their cloud connection. Maybe not at first, but it would be one day. They do not care about systemd, they don't use it. And if the stand-alone applications become unusable and unreliable due to the feature creep there, they will simply offer you their cloud based versions. So they will simply lean back watch the fireworks.
 
I don't know if this is the right place to post it, but I found an interesting page: Has anybody ever heard of supervisord?
http://supervisord.org/
It seems that you don't need to replace init to have something like launchd in f.e. FreeBSD.
This program, and may be there are many others, allows you to load your process control deamon at startup.
I am no expert, but this would basically satisfy everyone, the ones who want to use FreeBSD as a tablet OS, care about power consumption, care about the remarks Hubbard made, and the ones who want to use it still as a server OS.
 
retrogamer said:
I wanted to mention one thing in regard to Chromium. While it isn't my favorite browser for a whole host of reasons (the locked down add on architecture in particular), right now it is the only way to have support for MSE DRM on FreeBSD. Some may say, well, just use Flash with Firefox. This is a big problem - Firefox is eventually going to retire NPAPI, meaning that option is going away (from what I understand, this is why work on Gnash stopped as well, it would be a plugin without a browser). At that point, if you want to watch a Youtube video in 1080p or use any other website that requires EME, you will have to try running the Windows version of Firefox via WINE or rely on Chromium. A real use case example, the website Snag Films can only be used on FreeBSD with HTML5 via Chromium. http://www.snagfilms.com/ There's also the issue of performance, where HTML5 with hardware acceleration in Chromium is much lighter than Flash in Firefox. I realize not everyone cares about this, but there are still valid uses for Chromium. I really doubt this will ever happen with Chromium though, as its "tier 1" platforms (Chrome OS and Android) rely on upstart and init.rc respectively.

On that note, the EFF published an article about EME this week. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/new-drm-boss-same-old-boss
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MediaSourceExtensions are making their way into Firefox. Youtube is beginning to default to HTML5, and Mozilla is moving Shumway along to act as a Flash emulator. In other words, this is becoming a non-issue

Again, since I do not want to deal with RedHat's D-BUS, if I start a fork of FreeBSD, I will be segregating the current ports tree into priority and non-priority ports to encourage effective use of time. Now, I know that for some time Chromium has had a non-D-BUS patch, so if that runs against the version in ports, then hopefully the maintainer is willing to use that instead.

And D-BUS discussion is on-topic, as it is one of the frameworks systemd is built on, and if you've tried looking at the code for it, you'll see how nightmarishly bad it is.
 
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