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Bruce Byfield addresses the all-too-often-seen ugliness in open source software circles, and the tendency of open source enthusiasts, to start flame wars based on their personal preference.
He explains that most people working in open source development and free software have very strong feelings of satisfaction in their contributions to the community. But often these feelings have an ugly side.
The issue was brought to a head in an article about the decline of Apache OpenOffice, and the ascendance of LibreOffice. His email indicated that many writers wanted to see Apache humiliated due to differences in their approach even though the products were basically the same code-base.
What disturbs me is when the strong feelings devolve into insularity that excludes other free software projects.
Why, for example, would I possibly want to see OpenOffice humiliated? I prefer LibreOffice's releases, and -- with some misgivings -- the Free Software Foundation's philosophy and licensing over that of the Apache Foundation. I also question the efficiency of having two office suites so closely related to each other. Yet while exploring such issues may be news, I don't forget that, despite these differences, OpenOffice and the Apache Foundation still have the same general goals as LibreOffice or the Free Software Foundation.
[More after the Break]
This reminded him of the Desktop Environment wars, KDE vs Gnome, while several smaller players like XFCE, LXDE, and Enlightenment and a host of others, chug along largely unscathed. We see the same sort of camps forming around File Systems, Init Systems, as well as many user-space programs. We see user communities vilified, and companies trashed, usually for something tangential to the actual free or open source software involved. People become insular.
Sometimes, this kind of insularity may reflect which projects a person works on. However, at least as often, it is voiced by average users with no direct connection to any of the projects involved. It appears an expression of the human need to belong, although an unusually misguided one. ... In fact, I suspect that this insularity is responsible for much of the opposition to diversity efforts. After all, when your sense of who you are depends on externals and what you define yourself as not being, any change becomes uncomfortable -- and, often, an outright threat to your sense of self.
Personally, I'd have to say that what annoys me most about free and open source software are the forced marches imposed on the users, for frivolous reasons. To combat the insularity I see in myself, I try to install a different Distro, or a different OS every 6 months or so. I guess it's time to add a new Desktop Environment to those experiments. virtual machines are a godsend for this.
Bruce goes on to say
In theory, maybe some way exists to encourage the enthusiasm that free software inspires while discouraging the ugliness of insularity.
Soylentils: Do you ever force yourself to step outside your comfort zone with your choices of free software? If so, how, and how often?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @07:30PM
etbe.coker.com.au/2015/04/26/anti-systemd-people/
Anti-Systemd People
For the Technical People
This post isn\u2019t really about technology, I\u2019ll cover the technology briefly skip to the next section if you aren\u2019t interested in Linux programming or system administration.
I\u2019ve been using the Systemd init system for a long time, I first tested it in 2010 [1]. I use Systemd on most of my systems that run Debian/Wheezy (which means most of the Linux systems I run which aren\u2019t embedded systems). Currently the only systems where I\u2019m not running Systemd are some systems on which I don\u2019t have console access, while Systemd works reasonably well it wasn\u2019t a standard init system for Debian/Wheezy so I don\u2019t run it everywhere. That said I haven\u2019t had any problems with Systemd in Wheezy, so I might have been too paranoid.
I recently wrote a blog post about systemd, just some basic information on how to use it and why it\u2019s not a big deal [2]. I\u2019ve been playing with Systemd for almost 5 years and using it in production for almost 2 years and it\u2019s performed well. The most serious bug I\u2019ve found in systemd is Bug #774153 which causes a Wheezy->Jessie upgrade to hang until you run \u201csystemctl daemon-reexec\u201d [3].
I know that some people have had problems with systemd, but any piece of significant software will cause problems for some people, there are bugs in all software that is complex enough to be useful. However the fact that it has worked so well for me on so many systems suggests that it\u2019s not going to cause huge problems, it should be covered in the routine testing that is needed for a significant deployment of any new version of a distribution.
I\u2019ve been using Debian for a long time. The transitions from libc4 to libc5 and then libc6 were complex but didn\u2019t break much. The use of devfs in Debian caused some issues and then the removal of devfs caused other issues. The introduction of udev probably caused problems for some people too. Doing major updates to Debian systems isn\u2019t something that is new or which will necessarily cause significant problems, I don\u2019t think that the change to systemd by default compares to changing from a.out binaries to ELF binaries (which required replacing all shared objects and executables).
The Social Issue of the Default Init
Recently the Debian technical committee determined that Systemd was the best choice for the default init system in Debian/Jessie (the next release of Debian which will come out soon). Decisions about which programs should be in the default install are made periodically and it\u2019s usually not a big deal. Even when the choice is between options that directly involve the user (such as the KDE and GNOME desktop environments) it\u2019s not really a big deal because you can just install a non-default option.
One of the strengths of Debian has always been the fact that any Debian Developer (DD) can just add any new package to the archive if they maintain it to a suitable technical standard and if copyright and all other relevant laws are respected. Any DD who doesn\u2019t like any of the current init systems can just package a new one and upload it. Obviously the default option will get more testing, so the non-default options will need more testing by the maintainer. This is particularly difficult for programs that have significant interaction with other parts of the system, I\u2019ve had difficulties with this over the course of 14 years of SE Linux development but I\u2019ve also found that it\u2019s not an impossible problem to solve.
It\u2019s generally accepted that making demands of other people\u2019s volunteer work is a bad thing, which to some extent is a reasonable position. There is a problem when this is taken to extremes, Debian has over 1000 developers who have to work together so sometimes it\u2019s a question of who gets to do the extra work to make the parts of the distribution fit together. The issue of who gets to do the work is often based on what parts are the defaults or most commonly used options. For my work on SE Linux I often have to do a lot of extra work because it\u2019s not part of the default install and I have to make my requests for changes to other packages be as small and simple as possible.
So part of the decision to make Systemd be the default init is essentially a decision to impose slightly more development effort on the people who maintain SysVInit if they are to provide the same level of support \u2013 of course given the lack of overall development on SysVInit the level of support provided may decrease. It also means slightly less development effort for the people who maintain Systemd as developers of daemon packages MUST make them work with it. Another part of this issue is the fact that DDs who maintain daemon packages need to maintain init.d scripts (for SysVInit) and systemd scripts, presumably most DDs will have a preference for one init system and do less testing for the other one. Therefore the choice of systemd as the default means that slightly less developer effort will go into init.d scripts. On average this will slightly increase the amount of sysadmin effort that will be required to run systems with SysVInit as the scripts will on average be less well tested. This isn\u2019t going to be a problem in the short term as the current scripts are working reasonably well, but over the course of years bugs may creep in and a proposed solution to this is to have SysVInit scripts generated from systemd config files.
We did have a long debate within Debian about the issue of default init systems and many Debian Developers disagree about this. But there is a big difference between volunteers debating about their work and external people who don\u2019t contribute but believe that they are entitled to tell us what to do. Especially when the non-contributors abuse the people who do the work.
The Crowd Reaction
In a world filled with reasonable people who aren\u2019t assholes there wouldn\u2019t be any more reaction to this than there has been to decisions such as which desktop environment should be the default (which has caused some debate but nothing serious). The issue of which desktop environment (or which version of a desktop environment) to support has a significant affect on users that can\u2019t be avoided, I could understand people being a little upset about that. But the init system isn\u2019t something that most users will notice \u2013 apart from the boot time.
For some reason the men in the Linux community who hate women the most seem to have taken a dislike to systemd. I understand that being \u201cconservative\u201d might mean not wanting changes to software as well as not wanting changes to inequality in society but even so this surprised me. My last blog post about systemd has probably set a personal record for the amount of misogynistic and homophobic abuse I received in the comments. More gender and sexuality related abuse than I usually receive when posting about the issues of gender and sexuality in the context of the FOSS community! For the record this doesn\u2019t bother me, when I get such abuse I\u2019m just going to write more about the topic in question.
While the issue of which init system to use by default in Debian was being discussed we had a lot of hostility from unimportant people who for some reason thought that they might get their way by being abusive and threatening people. As expected that didn\u2019t give the result they desired, but it did result in a small trend towards people who are less concerned about the reactions of users taking on development work related to init systems.
The next thing that they did was to announce a \u201cfork\u201d of Debian. Forking software means maintaining a separate version due to a serious disagreement about how it should be maintained. Doing that requires a significant amount of work in compiling all the source code and testing the results. The sensible option would be to just maintain a separate repository of modified packages as has been done many times before. One of the most well known repositories was the Debian Multimedia repository, it was controversial due to flouting legal issues (the developer produced code that was legal where they lived) and due to confusion among users. But it demonstrated that you can make a repository containing many modified packages. In my work on SE Linux I\u2019ve always had a repository of packages containing changes that haven\u2019t been accepted into Debian, which included changes to SysVInit in about 2001.
The latest news on the fork-Debian front seems to be the call for donations [4]. Apparently most of the money that was spent went to accounting fees and buying a laptop for a developer. The amount of money involved is fairly small, Forbes has an article about how awful people can use \u201ccontroversy\u201d to get crowd-funding windfalls [5].
MikeeUSA is an evil person who hates systemd [6]. This isn\u2019t any sort of evidence that systemd is great (I\u2019m sure that evil people make reasonable choices about software on occasion). But it is a significant factor in support for non-systemd variants of Debian (and other Linux distributions). Decent people don\u2019t want to be associated with people like MikeeUSA, the fact that the anti-systemd people seem happy to associate with him isn\u2019t going to help their cause.
Conclusion
Forking Debian is not the correct technical solution to any problem you might have with a few packages. Filing bug reports and possibly forking those packages in an external repository is the right thing to do.
Sending homophobic and sexist abuse is going to make you as popular as the GamerGate and GodHatesAmerica.com people. It\u2019s not going to convince anyone to change their mind about technical decisions.
Abusing volunteers who might consider donating some of their time to projects that you like is generally a bad idea. If you abuse them enough you might get them to volunteer less of their time, but the most likely result is that they just don\u2019t volunteer on anything associated with you.
Abusing people who write technical blog posts isn\u2019t going to convince them that they made an error. Abuse is evidence of the absence of technical errors.