Behind systemd/gnome/pulseaudio/freedesktop/etc. there is funding, significant funding for the open source community. We are witnessing how slowly and progressively this funding is influencing control. We keep saying RH and RH, but we can only speculate why RH is funding and where did it come from for RH to spend it. Why?

i happen to agree with this completely, at least as it is said in this quote.

considering microsofts involvement with nokia, only to purchase part of it later, its not unreasonable to think ibm may have had similar involvement with red hat. except that i havent read about any of that-- i have read about microsofts involvement with red hat, and when they bought github in july i said "watch theyll buy red hat next."

i was told red hat was worth a lot more than i thought, and they are-- they were purchased for 17 times what i thought they were worth. and not by the people i thought would get them. however, its only been 3 months or so, and thats a lot shorter than my predictions usually run.

i believe red hat was working to gut posix and replace it with their own standard. this is a trademark (as in signature) strategy by microsoft. i consider systemd an eee tactic. its a lot harder to do eee on free software, but i think theres proof its not impossible-- just the fact that the fsf isnt promoting gpl2 suggests that even licenses can have unknown vulnerabilties (this is no revelation to a good lawyer) just like software does.

i refer to all exploits of such vulnerabilities as "redix." if people want to call it "eee" instead, thats fine. but i also call it redix because posix isnt strictly complied with, and it still provides a common ground for all these operating systems we care about.

even windows nt (and the gpl licensed free software version of the ntkernel people are writing from docs) have some influence from posix-- via microsofts collaboration with ibm about 20 years ago.

gutting posix and replacing it from the inside is a great way to attack our ecosystem. thats why i call it "redix." not because this isnt another eee attack, but because its an eee attack on a much larger scale than init. bigger than red hat, as you said. and i think its also bigger than systemd (which is a prominent example though so is the purchase of github and red hat. so are the things gnome and freedesktop do other than systemd.) it goes after the whole ecosystem.

at least i think so. this is something we want to guard against in general-- maybe-- at least before it actually takes over.

either way, systemd has set back free software for 3 or 4 years at least. it has hurt debian, one of the major flagships of gnu/linux (and even the one the fsf really relies on, whether they admit this openly or brand around it.)

its not like they dont have a backup plan-- but their actions over the past 12 years (at least) make it clear that their old plan is their backup-- their best plan is to use gnu/linux until it is more trouble than plan b.

i dont expect the hurd to ever steal the spotlight. its nice that we have at least 3 kernels though. forking the linux kernel (and forgetting gkh) is too big a task for devuan but not technically for the fsf. if they decided to do that, development would happen a lot more slowly and most people would choose the vanilla kernel--

which would probably work out better for redix than for free software.

all the biggest companies do things like this. thats what makes them the biggest. they are more about control than money itself. they can rely on control if theyre ever hurting for money.

this is one reason i think focusing on money is relevant, but focusing on it as the root cause doesnt quite ring true with me. control is the age-old problem. money, like everything else, is only one of its servants. fear lets the poor rule the poor-- and in a dark enough alley, can let the poor rule even the rich long enough to make a bundle.

money is one of many things that looks like the biggest problem on earth if you focus on it enough, until you go looking for bigger ones closer to the root. you can make someone part with their money just leaning on ignorance and fear-- i know you can buy both of those problems in bulk. you can also get them in significant quantities for free.

try paying someone to get rid of their ignorance and fear, and i think youll find that in terms of root causes, money is at worst the third down the totem pole. its just not the strongest force-- not even in terms of the negative.

people forget that a lot of poisons become completely harmless when you mix them with the right ingredients:

"Johnny was a chemist,
now he is no more,

what he thought was H2O,
was H2SO4"

either of two solutions (ba-dum tsh!) could have saved johnny though. the one i read years ago was to mix the acid with another chemical that would make it safe.

the other is simply to dilute it. with enough water added (this was noted on quora) drinking a little sulfuric acid wont hurt you-- it just tastes bad.

after all, our rain is full of h2so4, which is heavily diluted. im not saying it is good for the environment, though a little is safe to drink.

the trick is often in the amounts, as much as it is in the composition. at too high an h2so4 concentration, thirst is better than dying from sulfuric acid. at low enough a concentration, a little sulfuric acid is better than dying of thirst.

you can make a simple rule, but if it is strictly followed the simplest rules often (i think most times) require overlooking more important details. the exceptions to that are pretty cool-- those times we come up with actual laws of physics or logic, the ones which hold up pretty well for at least hundreds of years or more.

good points.

i also agree about what ibm is capable of doing in this situation, though it is more common for microsoft to buy things and then put a deliberate stop to them.

the m.o. of ibm seems more to be "develop whatever we can, until it dies under its own weight or until it proves unuseful." sort of borg-like "we will add your diversity to our own" with a "waste not, want not" approach.

which doesnt mean they dont kill stuff all the time, just that theyre more likely to give it a fair shake-- possibly after rebranding, redeveloping, and completely dropping the ball like they often do with clouseau-like dexterity and yet still manage. maybe they thought microsoft just had too much of the playing field, and decided to become an important sponsor. though i doubt thats the whole story, and i dont trust or like ibm. theyre just not as known for screwing up everyone elses stuff as much as their own.

sysvinit was dropped and will be making a surprising comeback, more than people expect, not because it is the best init but simply because there still isnt one. systemd was alleged to change that for the better, but i think it is innocent. after all, init systems dont kill distros, people do.

lennart, with the free time gained, can hopefully save us from the text editor next.

there are just too many of those, and if he can find a way, we can finally stop living in the 20th century with the likes of emacs and vim (or worse, nano) and unify all editors in a way that simply requires learning new shortcuts for all emacs commands. seriously guys, its really not that hard. just read the documentation.

yes, we have remapped ctrl-alt-del to load and save files, and sometimes the wordwrap feature deletes half the book you were working on. but thats an upstream problem and gkh is going to add something to the kernel to fix it once and for all. as for ctrl-alt-del for file saving, weve used that in-house for years and it works great.

no, emacs and vim dont have that problem, only because theyve been inefficiently coding around it all this time, but we still need a modern editor and emacs and vim just cant be salvaged at this point. so we came up with something new and now 60% of mainstream distros are making it their default. bram, this is your wakeup call.

after the editor cedes partial support for "legacy vim features" that require dbus, pulseaudio and a kernel module based on the wine project (to support a couple of vital dll libraries) those will be phased out in the next version for a hardcoded dns lookup so that we are 100% certain the editor can update its spellchecker-- after a quick reboot, of course. if for some reason you dont have an active network connection, this is not a problem-- the editor will just wait to load until one becomes available.

im pretty sure systemd wasnt software at all. it was more likely a giant psychological experiment done by facebooks marketing team to find out just how much you can screw with software people have relied on for decades without actually starting a global armed conflict.

im working on a similar program, i knew about hyperbolas database (it is being used in the program im making) though i didnt know about your-freedom or freedom. thats cool info.

mine isnt a removal tool, it is just for screening.

hyperbolas database treats systemd as a freedom problem. i applaud this, the concept of my own tool is to make the user aware of various freedom issues, including systemd. vrms is the classic example of such a tool, but inadequate. considering that the blacklist hyperbola uses was the first stop towards such a tool of my own, i bet their your-freedom tool is great.