[mdlug] Systemd Should Be A Fork -- Why Is It Not?

[gib at juno.com]

Perhaps we could spend a few minutes in one of our meetings talking about this. Sounds like we have some interesting thoughts to cover.

---------- Original Message ----------
From: Gregory Czerniak <gregczrk at gmail.com>
To: "MDLUG's Main discussion list" <mdlug at mdlug.org>
Subject: Re: [mdlug] Systemd Should Be A Fork -- Why Is It Not?
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2015 17:20:50 -0400

First, I want to say that I admire that you are so passionate for what you
believe in.  However, it appears you have several fundamental
misunderstandings about open source and free software:

1) RMS considers himself an advocate of free software, not open source.
According to RMS, the vital difference is that open source focuses on the
software's practical benefits rather than ethics.  Based on the open source
founders' own statements, the term "open source" was specifically
engineered that way to be more palatable to the business community.  See
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c for more information.

2) Both the free software and open source movements have no problems with
profit.  Richard Stallman even encourages people not to miss a vital
opportunity to make money by selling free software.  The FSF also considers
it ethical to write and provide support for free software under contract.
See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html and
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html for more info.  Even Linus
Torvalds makes a salary from the Linux Foundation, which is mostly provided
from its Platinum Members: Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm,
and Samsung.

3) Both the free software and open source movements have published formal
documents explaining what they are about.  The Free Software Foundation is
about encouraging the authorship of software that respects the Four
Freedoms.  The Open Source Definition specifically lists what freedoms you
must grant (and which ones you can't) in order for the software to be open
source.  Please note that these definitions do not describe anything about
software design.  See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and
http://opensource.org/docs/osd for more info.

4) Except for certain "must not" statements in the Open Source definition,
both free software and open source are defined in terms of what they grant,
not what they force you to do.  Copyleft grants you a license that gives
you the Four Freedoms on the contingency that you in turn grant those
liberties to others.  There is a famous rant in Revolution OS (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c#t=1h3m49s ) where ESR makes
this abundantly clear: open source is not about forcing people to do things.

The closest thing to codification of a Unix design philosophy is ESR's "The
Art of Unix Programming" ( http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ ).
However, the values espoused in this book predate the open-source movement
-- the early designers of Unix followed these principles back when Unix was
proprietary software sold by AT&T.  It is an orthogonal issue from open
source or free software (as a matter of fact, GNU stands for "GNU's Not
Unix").

The free software and open source community has always been a gift
economy.  Code and work beats talk.  If you are truly passionate about
systemd destroying the world, then resist by joining the Devuan developer
community.  Beat systemd with a better design.

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 3:35 PM, A. Zimmer <andrew.zimmer at comcast.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 14:26:35 -0400
> Gregory Czerniak <gregczrk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There are logical tensions between advocating for choice and trying to
> > dictate what a loosely-federated group of developers (some organized as
> > democracies of varying levels of complexity) should or shouldn't do.
> There
> > are also tensions between advocating for freedom and saying that the
> people
> > in freedesktop.org and Red Hat should be denied their freedom to
> associate.
> >
>
> Absolute nonsense.  We all know damn well what open source programmers
> should do.
>
> Open source is not about profit.  Open source is not about ideology.
> Open source is about producing applications that serve all of the people
> all of the time.  Open source achieves this by maintaining a near-infinite
> configurability that empowers the user to do what the user will.
>
> The agenda of systemd deviates from this in toto.
>
> Richard Stallman got it right when he begot the GNU project so long ago.
> But these RedHat goons like Poettering and freedesktop.org want to
> overturn
> this freedom in the name of their own self-defined "progress."
>
> _______________________________________________
> mdlug mailing list
> mdlug at mdlug.org
> http://mdlug.org/mailman/listinfo/mdlug
>
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