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The Initfinder General (uselessd author) discusses why the systemd debate is so heated. He points fingers at both sides and the story has little to do with who's correct, but everything to to with why no one can agree at all.
[...] I saw the same systemd debate unfold again. I’ve seen it countless times already, and there was virtually no variation from the archetypal formula. You have two ardent and vocal sides, roughly classified into an opponent/proponent dichotomy, neither of which have anything enlightening to say and both with their own unique set of misunderstandings that have memetically mutated into independent ideas that poison virtually every debate of this nature.
Read on for a look at the fuel behind everyone's favorite flamewar.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Wednesday October 22 2014, @06:36PM
As a semi-outsider to the Linux world (I used to run various flavors of Linux as my main OS back near the turn of the millenium), I've been paying only peripheral attention to Linux and the BSDs for the last decade. Every year or so I'll download a couple of the major Linux distros or a BSD and play around with them for a while, just to see how things are progressing. My overall impression has always been that the BSD community has always placed more emphasis on correctness and conservative stability while the Linux crowd has always placed more emphasis on evolving quickly and trying new things. But either way, most of the people involved in the *nix world prize some things above all: Freedom, and stability, and respect for people who really know what they're doing. Systemd seems to fly directly in the face of all those things.
The original Unix Philosophy, for instance, is a recognition by old highly experienced neckbeard software and hardware engineers back in early computing times that Murphy's Law is an absolute truth of the universe. The more complex a system is, the more likely it is to create problems instead of solving them. The more tightly integrated a system is, the more difficult it will be to adapt the system to different kinds of tasks. And of course, the more difficult it will be to maintain and troubleshoot. The systemd supporters don't seem to want to acknowledge or have any respect for any of these universal truths. This immediately alienates a good portion of the entire *nix community.
Out of all the disagreements I've seen in a decade and a half of observing the Linux world, this is the first one I've seen that has a high probability of producing a real permanent split in the community, and possibly even a true forking of the Linux kernel if the situation gets bad enough. I've been very surprised at the lackadaisical attitude of Linus toward the rapid encroachment of systemd, and I think that's disappointed a lot of the community as well. One thing is for certain, in the entirety of the last decade I haven't seen nearly as many people talking about switching from Linux to BSD as I have just in the last several months. The schism that is being created by the systemd battle should be worrisome to both sides. I fall on the side of the anti-systemd crowd for the very simple reason that all they are asking for is the same freedom of choice that brought most of them into the *nix world in the first place, whereas the pro-systemd crowd just seems to want everyone to be forced to use their brand new toy. No one has yet said anything on this issue that has convinced me I need to know more than that.
Choice is everything, or Linux becomes a joke to its most die-hard users and supporters. If systemd becomes an unremovable parasite on the kernel, even if it's a symbiotic parasite, those who do not wish to use it will simply flee the Linux world entirely. Can the Linux community survive losing a third or even a quarter of its developers over the next couple of years? It's an interesting question.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:56PM
Just a thought - what fraction of "Linux" developers are now actually Android or embedded developers ? Linux would survive and prosper in those spaces even if all the Desktop guys forked each other into oblivion. Maybe that is why Linus doesn't care ?
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Thursday October 23 2014, @07:54AM
I don't know about the percentages, but in "Just For Fun" (Linus' official biography, which he helped write) he makes a few rants that boil down to him wanting to be able to almost play a hobbyist developer's role in terms of working on the kernel while it's fun and not needing to pay attention to anything else, as he hates the pressure of feeling like his opinions or actions will affect others.
IIRC at one point he talks about an earlier schism in the community where he refused to take sides or even investigate the argument because of that attitude, so I suspect that's why he's staying silent on the systemd issue.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday October 22 2014, @10:46PM
As much as has been said on this, I'm not sure anything I've seen sums it up better than this. Thanks.
(Score: 1) by goody on Thursday October 23 2014, @02:29AM
A saying that I heard years ago kind of supports what's going on right now: "BSD users love Unix, Linux users just hate Windows." BSD users love and embrace the Unix philosophy, the core tenets. Linux users in general don't have this same sort of love of the core tenets of Unix, they're more interested in killing Windows and getting Linux on the desktop so the proverbial grandmother can run it.