On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 9:10 AM, deloptes <deloptes@...> wrote: > Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > >> the more i learn about systemd the more shocked i become that people >> don't realise how serious this really is. > > I do realize, but swimming against the flow is getting very hard. Especially > for notebook and phone systemd has some advantages, regardless of the > disadvantages. > I agree a lot could be done better, I agree there should have been a broader > discussion, but systemd is an evidence of the changes in our society - at > least I see it this way. There are groups of people, who think they know > better and the impose decisions to the rest without asking. yeah. i'm glad - relieved - to know that i'm not the only one that's noticed. i just watched captain america, civil war (again) and sharon quotes her aunt as saying that you have to have the courage to stand and say "no, you move". > Interestingly a > lot of those people come from the left/liberal corner. Not that I want to > mess up with politics here, but those are my observations. So ... quo vadis > Free Software, is my question? yeah, exactly. a couple of observations: i began working with software libre - particularly on samba - because the polarisation of 2+ decades of windows (SMB, NT Domains) was causing businesses to get completely trapped and to have to take DRASTIC decisions to entirely abandon either UNIX or NT, or to simply remain unable to convert and to have to deal with the consequences. .... now fast-forward to this decade... take out "Microsoft" and replace it with "Pottering working for Redhat"... replace "Samba" with "sysvinit" (or any other init system), replace "NT" with "systemd"... ... you get where i'm going with that? because apart from the names, the scenario is exactly the same: just as you describe, certain people have placed themselves into a position of power which they are then blatantly abusing. second: i don't know about you but anyone who's had death threats made against them, i simply do not want that person's software on any machines that are my responsibility, and that's really the end of the matter. pottering is a type of individual whose general attitude inspires otherwise reasonable and rational people to go absolutely fucking nuts: that's a good enough indication that there's something desperately, desperately wrong with *his* mind-set... and that ends up percolating down to the code that he writes. it's a real simple decision: his code is OUT. the third observation: software libre is actually about ethical behaviour *AND* software. it's an extremely rare combination which leaves the total number of people who actually really truly understand the "whole point", worldwide, as being really very small. systemd's across the board ram-it-down-people's-throats adoption has completely violated the implicit trust placed by end-users in the developers of software libre... in *DIRECT* violation of the underlying ethical principles on which software libre is founded. not even dr stallman fully comprehends this... because.. well... systemd has a GNU GPL license on it, right? so he's *not even in a position to criticise it*. basically software libre is at a really interesting cross-roads which really has absolutely nothing to do with proprietary software at all. the more people that are aware of this, recognise it, and decide "no, the line is drawn. we will not bow to being rail-roaded" the better society will be for it. dr stallman's recent interview with lunduke has a really appropriate turn of phrase that he used to describe tim berners lee. the exact same words are appropriate here. l.