SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
It looks like Microsoft hasn't reformed as some would like to think, but has moved its embrace, extend, extinguish policy to the mobile platform. In this article from techrights.org , we see a company (responsible for Mono) with strong MS connections take over an open source project and close it.
LAST WEEK we wrote about Xamarin's disturbing takeover of RoboVM [1, 2], which was a threat to Microsoft's monopoly and domination of APIs (especially on the desktop). Xamarin, for the uninitiated, creates proprietary software that strives to spread Microsoft's .NET to mobile (including Android) devices.
It has only been less than a week and now we learn from Abel Avram that "RoboVM Is No Longer Open Source".
"Following RoboVM's acquisition by Xamarin," explains Avram, "the company has raised the price of their offering and has closed the source code."
Discussion of a fork is in the works:
It has gotten so bad that RoboVM might be forked. To quote Avram, "some developers consider that closing down the source code has to do with Xamarin's acquisition. And some are discussing forking the project, perhaps starting with the sources v. 1.8 which will be pushed to GitHub this week, according to Zechner. It remains to see how successful they are in their endeavor considering that RoboVM is not a trivial piece of software."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:30PM
OpenBSD, for example, is moving right along with the latest Gnome, working perfectly, and without systemd, because they have competent package maintainers.
No. OpenBSD has made it's own systemd shim [undeadly.org]. That does nothing to stave off the encroachment on the ports. GNOME could keep moving into systemd territory until even a shim is not enough.
Yes, they have competent port maintainers but you're wrong about the GNOME port if you are somehow implying that they've removed the nasty bits for their ports collection.
Red Hat is just doing what M$ itself outlined in the Halloween Documents [catb.org]. That is to say, they are finding a way to decommoditize the GNU/Linux distros.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 04 2015, @12:05AM
GNOME could keep moving into systemd territory until even a shim is not enough.
So what's the problem exactly? No one's forcing you to use Gnome, and it's a piece of crap anyway. Why everyone seems to think Gnome is the de-facto standard Linux desktop environment is beyond me. It's the absolute worst of all of them. Who cares what they require?
KDE for one doesn't require systemd, and never will because KDE actually cares about running on non-Linux platforms (esp. the BSDs).
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:47AM
KDE for one doesn't require systemd, and never will because KDE actually cares about running on non-Linux platforms (esp. the BSDs).
Ditto for XFCE, and I haven't used LXDE in years, but I imagine they are in the same boat as well.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday November 04 2015, @07:24AM
KDE for one doesn't require systemd, and never will because KDE actually cares about running on non-Linux platforms (esp. the BSDs).
Unfortunately, earlier this year it was revealed that Plasma 5 was/is going to depend on systemd, as David Edmunson explained [davidedmundson.co.uk]. If that changed, I'll be glad to hear it; last I was aware, it was the main reason PCLinuxOS was refraining from upgrading to KDE 5.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday November 06 2015, @02:36AM
It sounds like they're making use of certain parts of it, and making sure it works on other OSes (namely BSD):
"As maintainers we have a duty to balance what will provide the best experience for the majority of our Plasma users without leaving anyone with a broken system. Projects like this bring the interfaces we need to BSD and as it gets more stable we should be able to start distributing features."
(Score: 1, Troll) by opinionated_science on Wednesday November 04 2015, @03:33AM
I sometimes wonder if the systemd encroachment is nothing more than the systemd guys doing a "because we can".
On the other hand, some folks just don't like change such as init scripts - sorry to offend anyone, but the flexibility of scripts is not something you want in a system directory. And I have written many for my systems!!!
Lennard Poettering may not have the charm to wash over the community, but he is no fool - his blog makes a great deal of sense , where internet postings simply rant.
Read about the BTRFS/systemd deployment model being developed - this would allow linux to reflect any combination of distribution applications natively.
And ultimately, if Linux is to survive, having it hide under Android skins is not the way. It is critical that is makes inroads onto the desktop, otherwise we will have future generations lost to proprietary lockin-gloss....