Warning - FreeBSD (*BSD) entanglement in Linux ecosystem

[Hans Ottevanger]

On 08/20/12 16:42, Mark Felder wrote:
> Those in on the core teams here are very well aware. Did you notice
> we've survived this long without ALSA? :-) However, this is very good
> reading for anyone who hasn't looked at Linux lately, and it's worth
> mentioning that this is snowballing quickly. I used to really like some
> Linux distros. I've been working closely with FreeBSD for 3 years now
> and after watching Linux change in those 3 years from this distance I'm
> not sure I want to go back. Everything that originally excited me about
> *nix operating systems is gone; it's a big convoluted mess now. This
> isn't a good sign and I hope someone has the sense enough to stand their
> ground and tell RedHat/Poettering "NO".
>
>
> TEAR DOWN THIS WALL, MR GORB^H^H^H^HPOETTERING

I had the honor to meet that Mr. Poettering in person at a conference a 
while ago and tried to discuss the portability issues caused by the 
imminent proliferation of an over-engineered and unnecessary subsystem 
like systemd. My conclusion was that the guy talks a lot and never 
listens (mirroring his on-line behavior) and in general is a type of guy 
I had rather see in the enemy camp, instead of in the ranks of a (in my 
case) valued business partner. Also, he appears to have practically free 
reign within Red Hat, where currently nobody seems to have a clear 
overview of the OS related issues and system initialization is 
considered a minor technical feature. So I don't think you should expect 
Mr. Poettering to tear down any walls any time soon 8-)

I can only hope that FreeBSD and the leftover systemd averse Linux 
distros can prevent higher level subsystems (like Xorg, KDE, Xfce, etc) 
to depend too much on current and future systemd features. Maybe this is 
an opportunity for the mostly invisible core team of FreeBSD to publicly 
take a position here, if only to take away concerns of users with 
respect to systemd portability issues in the future.

Kind regards,

Hans Ottevanger