[Arm-netbook] systemd nonsense ad-infinitum

[Jean Flamelle]

I think the driving point no one wants to argue about and therefore
has been lapdancing around, is one way or another systemd is developed
by a very ambitious company.

Not even speaking to the morals of said company or it's constitutents,
it's sustainable existence depends on monopolizing volunteer support
for subsystems that it finds to be marketable.

This isn't a conflict of interest, necessarily. However, people are
Afraid there might be if there hasn't been already been underhanded
tactics, exploiting their income to rapidly expand development for an
ultra specific however most leverage-able component of the GNU/Linux
system, implementing more features, faster, and with fewer bugs than
can possibly be audited for by volunteers. If no one can replace
systemd because they simply can't code as well as them nearly as fast
as them, because they lack the income to survive doing so, it means
that the strength of desire to advance humanity will soon no longer be
the most significant force enabling the development of linux, as,
regardless of the morals and vision the redhat team have, others will
follow their example. At the end of the day, this is an improper means
to get to goals that for all intensive purposes are simultaneously
uncertain and hard to argue with. What happens when other
organisations realize they can build leverage over the linux community
by ultra-specializing, and massively accelerating the development of a
very tiny component of the system with very rapid bug-free feature
creeps, effectively making it bloatware that functions REALLY WELL and
encouraging people to either expand it according to their vision or
feel deprived of it. Right now, it's very difficult to say whether or
not this is an intention of the redhat team and it would be very
reasonable to call it unintentional, but their behavior is suggesting
to others that this is an acceptable practice regardless of
intentions.

I sincerely understand these are people trying to make the world a
sweeter place albeit in a "ends are more important than
means"-kinda-unintentional-way. These aren't super-villains like PR
would have us believe, in fact quite likely very much the opposite.

This isn't really the poster-example of a healthy way of settling
differences inside a community. Maybe the redhat team should have done
more to trying reaching out to the most informed systemd critics, and
maybe those critics should have done more to beat down the flames
their words fanned. This whole debacle seems far from civil and I
don't understand why, fully yet.

Hope, I'm helping with perspective :d