With the top voted post being "systemd haters have gone too far," I find it worth mentioning that there is no relation between approving of death threats and thinking a systemd monoculture is a bad idea.
Death threats are wrong. Victims aren't to blame for death threats. On the other hand, that doesn't do anything to redeem systemd or dismiss criticism of systemd.
Unfortunately, now the meme will be that critics of systemd are dangerous lunatics because of the death threats that most critics of systemd never made or approved of. This (and procedural irregularities, etc.) exemplify the ugly "total war" tone that was instrumental in pushing systemd through. The death threats are inexcusable. But the poor tone and bitter feelings have roots in what was done to get systemd where it is today.
And if you are telling critics of systemd, who have nothing to do with death threats that "[they] are not welcome anymore in the community" - you are not contributing to the improvement of the tone. You are waging total war.
I don't think that is true at this point. Books of criticisms on systemd have already been written. There isn't a maintainer out there who hasn't heard all of it. Yet many people still insist on bothering the community with this, it's become a burden. And it's not a burden because the criticisms are valid, it's a burden because the criticisms don't actually contribute anything.
I think at this point it is safe to say that anyone voicing criticisms on systemd without contributing fixes or solutions to said problems is hostile to the Debian community, and should neither feel or be welcome.
Feeling unwelcome is the only way these people will realise they will either have to solve the problem themselves, or start a new community.
> I think at this point it is safe to say that anyone voicing criticisms on systemd without contributing fixes or solutions to said problems is hostile to the Debian community, and should neither feel or be welcome.
What the heck? Those criticising systemd have a fix, and a solution (two, even!): either don't use it, or use it but don't rely on it.
Slackware, Gentoo/Funtoo, CRUX, PCLinuxOS and all its derivatives. Then some more niche ones like Alpine Linux (which also eschews a lot of the GNU base system for alternatives) and Void Linux.
I completely condemn such nonsense as a bunch of vitriolic people driving a distribution maintainer away from their position all because of their indirect affiliation with a controversial project.
Such actions are why I identify with neither the systemd opponents nor the proponents. Unfortunately, it does dilute arguments against systemd, because of immediate associations with fools who attack people and scream fallacies (even though the non-systemd camp is an amorphous blob more than anything). This in turn gives moral high ground to the proponents and any attempt at debate devolves into the same dead ends and non-arguments between equally clueless factions.
Yet as much as the entire display is abominable, it is sadly also completely predictable. For all the good things the systemd crew have done, their ideas are disruptive, in that they're trying to mold a cathedral out of what has been a rather adamantly bazaar-based community for over two decades now. Contrary to popular belief, simply developing your tools in one repository doesn't magically make you "more like the BSDs" - there's far more to the BSDs than that, and every time I see someone make that argument, I twitch.
We're in the midst of an unprecedented schism. But, for what it's worth, this isn't an issue with "open source". No, it's an issue with the Linux community in particular. It is particularly dysfunctional. I have no idea why Linux attracts so much drama and carnage amongst its constituents, but it does.
I'm pretty disappointed in all sides here. The people who attack systemd and its developers on completely false premises, and the people who are convinced it's the be all and the end all, and have been living under a sysvinit-based rock their entire lives. It's just so exhausting. It really is.
I don't know how this will end. But the irony is intense: an attempt at distro unification has led to a big divide. The best thing we can hope for is people doing a bunch of new experimentation in Unix process management. Projects like Epoch and nosh are up and coming. Hopefully we'll see more.
> I have no idea why Linux attracts so much drama and carnage amongst its constituents, but it does.
It starts right from the top, just like the similar situation in the Rails community.
When your founder and leader behaves a certain way, it gives everyone in the community license to act like that.
Edit: I seem to have touched a nerve here. My apology to anyone my comment offended.
Nonetheless, I stand by the idea that the culture of a company or open source is heavily influenced by the behavior of those at the top. How could it not be?
As an example of the other end of the spectrum, when I worked at Adobe it was a remarkably courteous place where people treated each other with respect even when they disagreed. I really appreciated that, and I think a good part of it came directly from Adobe founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke.
But then by this logic, OpenBSD should also be a dysfunctional mess. It's not. It has almost the same number of contributors per 6-month release cycle that systemd alone gets in only about 3 months, yet it is a remarkably productive project.
No, I do not think Linus is at fault here. I think a more likely explanation is that (GNU/)Linux is the go to alternative operating system, and it gets a lot of cocky newbies who think they're special for using a Unix-like operating system.
I don't know, BSD seems to attract a lot of people who seem self-congratulatory that they're not using Linux, just like how MacOS has been the Anti-Windows since circa 1995.
My theory is that it's straight-up due to how many people use Linux compared to other non-Windows OSes and the fact the average people have more say (or think they do) compared to The One Apple Way. Any large group will have assholes, and the number of assholes is a simple percentage of the total.
My personal experience is that BSD people by and large care about Linux mostly out of necessity, but nonetheless they're still knowledgeable about both. Mostly they're angry whenever the Linux community feels the need to reinvent yet another square wheel (as was mocked in the OpenBSD 5.2 release song), because it slows them from doing their own innovations and necessitates them to emulate Linux's interfaces.
In contrast, a disturbingly large number of Linux users remain willfully ignorant about other Unices and, worse, they attack them without knowing the first thing about them.
But yes, Linux users are dominant, so more idiots overall.
So because BSD attracts people who seem self-congratulatory that they are not using Linux it begets a productive non-asshole environment?
The parent poster was stating that OpenBSD also has a strongly opinionated leader at the top (Theo de Raadt) who has been known to rant and rave like the best, yet unlike the Linux community the OpenBSD community as a whole does not behave like that and ships functioning code quickly and efficiently.
Is that the same Theo who threw a tantrum because nobody notified him ahead of time of some OpenSSL vulnerability after he specifically declined an invitation to be on the cross-distro security mailing list where such notifications get posted?
At best, people are imitating what they think Linus is doing. But most people miss out on just how rare Linus's rants are, how deserving his targets are when he does let loose and how much they should've known better, and most people aren't as authoritative as Linus.
> ...how deserving his targets are when he does let loose...
I think I see the problem here.
I don't follow the Linux community that deeply but I've read one of his rants which was belittling and insulting to a volunteer maintainer and the context behind it didn't justify the abuse in my opinion. If you don't appreciate their code, get rid of them. They're probably not trying to intentionally screw up. And if they are, tell them it's not working out and stop working with them.
P.S. Would be interesting if "Gaming is misogynistic" folks decide to focus on the Linux community. I can almost see the headlines: "Linux users are dead!"
So you're saying that a "my way or the highway" policy is more polite and better for the health of the project and developer community than the occasional bit of colorful language? It seems to me that the former is a much bigger insult in an "actions speak louder than words" kind of way, especially coming from people for whom the primary concern is producing working code, not politics.
1. I'm not complaining about colorful language. There's a difference between that and insulting people.
> I don't understand why it's so hard to fucking understand how Linus' behavior is abhorrent.
> wtallis, you've got to be the biggest fucking idiot to not understand how Linus' behavior is abhorrent.
See the difference?
2. I'm not familiar with the way the Linux kernel contributions are managed. I assumed from what I've heard that Linus is in charge and can reject patches. If that is the case, than a "my way or the highway" policy is the current policy. I may be wrong in this regard so please feel free to clear up any misunderstanding I may have.
For Linux, the "your patches will not be accepted" responses comes approximately after you've ignored a dozen or so Linus rants, each of which will generally first come after you've ignored advice and suggestions from dozens of other people and still insisted on submitting broken stuff. Probably, if you manage to get "banned", at least one rant about you will have featured on HN or Reddit.
Rejecting patches happens often, and usually for mundane reasons. Rejecting people is extreme, and something that's only happened a very, very few times. Off the top of my head I can only remember Kay Sievers [1]. Even then he left the door open ("Let distributions merge it as they need to and maybe we can merge it once it has been proven to be stable by whatever distro that was willing to play games with the developers").
It's hard to get Linus to rant at you in the first place. It is many times as hard to get him to refuse to deal with your code. Basically, you have to persistently be submitting code that the kernel team considers total junk and persistently refuse to acknowledge or deal with the suggestions given.
For your first point, the difference will only ever be very small when the topic of discussion is something that is inherently associated with a particular person, such as a patch with a specific submitter. The phrasing of the former example is more passive-aggressive, but usually no less targeted.
For your second point, you said:
"If you don't appreciate their code, get rid of them. [...] tell them it's not working out and stop working with them."
That implies more than just rejecting bad patches, it implies rejecting the developer himself. That's extremely rare. The Linux kernel developers are very forgiving of mistakes: your patches will get rejected if they're bad, but they'll still get looked at until you establish a really bad track record of not learning from your mistakes.
> I think some people are just irrationally upset about perceived threats to something that is very important to them.
Some opponents of systemd seem to think that a move to systemd is an irreversible move in the wrong direction -- that once a distro moves to systemd, there's no going back, because systemd is large, complex, and monolithic, unlike the simple and modular SysV init system. If one is strongly attached to Debian, and feels that the distro is moving irreversibly in the wrong direction, I can see why one would strongly oppose such a move.
The elephant in the room here is that this is behavior that is largely people imitating Linus's "personal style". Although he doesn't resort to death wishes, the tone he's famous to setting on mailing lists pretty much inevitably leads to other people thinking "this is OK".
> Unfortunately, it does dilute arguments against systemd, because of immediate associations with fools who attack people and scream fallacies (even though the non-systemd camp is an amorphous blob more than anything). This in turn gives moral high ground to the proponents and any attempt at debate devolves into the same dead ends and non-arguments between equally clueless factions.
This is a time honored way to destroy your opponents in politics even if their argument is better, more consistent, and logical. Associate them with radicals that glom onto any side with sufficient numbers. It works and frustrates those that come by their beliefs honestly. It is truly sad when this happens and is allowed to obscure a discussion.
Upon reflection, I don't think this is a systemd problem -- which is to say, many other distros (not even ones sponsored by Red Hat -- Arch, SuSE, Mageia, NixOS, etc.) have managed to switch to systemd as a default without this kind of a fuss. It's only Debian where this kind of a shitstorm has kicked off -- even Gentoo, which has been a rather vocal systemd holdout, offers systemd and doesn't seem to have this kind of political infighting about it. Now, yes, Debian and its downstreams have a large part of the Linux userbase, so there's apt to be more attention paid to it. But I'm starting to think this is a Debian problem, not a systemd problem.
And the reason I think that is because this isn't a question of whether or not people do or don't use systemd. It's a question of who is going to do the work to ensure that people who choose not to use systemd can continue to use popular packages like GNOME, etc. And to this end, Ian Jackson is leading a vocal group that is willing to use ANY means at hand -- the Technical Committee, General Resolutions, whatever -- in order to cudgel Debian package maintainers and upstream software into doing the work that they think needs to be done in order to support their desire not to use systemd. The problem in a volunteer project like Debian, forcing volunteers to do work they don't want to doesn't lead to the volunteers doing the work you insist they should do, it leads to volunteers leaving. And the upstreams are not going to respond to Jackson's quite frankly childish attempts to bully them into continuing to support sysvinit from now until the end of time. And until Jackson and his backers step into the breach to actually write freaking code to do what they want to instead of politicking to try and force others to write they code they want, it's going to continue to drag the Debian project into this kind of a mess.
> even Gentoo, which has been a rather vocal systemd holdout, offers systemd and doesn't seem to have this kind of political infighting about it.
One of Gentoo's fundamental goals is to provide the users with as much choice as possible.
So far, they managed to get Systemd as an alternative to OpenRC. The major part of their issue with Systemd earlier was udev's dependency on Systemd, which made a lot of typical things messier. Once that got sorted, things are moving forward. Gentoo just wants to be a 'meta-distribution' so you can make your own customized system, and Systemd dependencies being added everywhere were detrimental to that effort.
The switch to systemd is made by authority, not competence.
The roadmap and the properties of systemd are totally awesome ... on the paper.
The problem in reality is that authority does not makes good engineering. Marketing neither. Systemd can be picked up for way too many reasons but imposing a poorly designed solution () by authority is hitting a nerve.
This move is looking like good old microsoft force feeding wrong technical solutions (thus costing expensive resources) to ALL free unices and a lot of projects for a wtf motivation that is clearly not the optimum technically.
You know how hard it is to make a software that works? Every resource spoiled on a stupid idea at the OS level is like a tax imposed on every single software that requires to be integrated in the system ... thus ALL projects.
Since some of them are impacted they voice their concern. And since debian is one of the most prominent linux that is clearly free software, that is where people voices their bug reports and sometimes also their concerns.
Btw look at the bugs in this mailing list, some are just non acceptable (why would you need dbus to login? What a sysadmin can thus do when dbus fails? For Zeus' sakes: WTF! 0_o)
Its hard without knowing the full context. But if it is as it appears, that some people from the debian community have been making attacks on a volunteer for doing their job, then it is absolutely disgusting behaviour. Those making such attacks would be best to leave debian and perhaps the internet.
> flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of incompetence.
Wow, these are really contrasting examples.
This HN thread is really focusing on the first category but I who haven't been following any of this actually had the impression that the 2nd category (incompetence) was right on the money regarding the recent bugs I've seen in my Debian installation.
I've used Debian since 2000 or so (slink was the first release I installed). I don't know if this problem is Debian or upstream. But ever since systemd became the default, my machine displays "Segmentation fault" at every boot, boots slower than before, and my previously working bluetooth pairings broke. Even when Debian was inserting extra memset()s into OpenSSL, I've never seen it this bad. It really doesn't feel like the system it used to be and I'm about to give up on it.
Can you context this up for us? Are you running the unstable testing branch and complaining about bugs? (If so, have you filed these bugs with anyone?) Or has your Debian system somehow gotten more buggy since they announced that systemd would be the default init system of the version of Debian that ISN'T OUT YET?
> Are you running the unstable testing branch and complaining about bugs?
Yeah I'm running testing. I have been running either testing or unstable on personal machines on a rolling basis since slink (released 1999) and I have experienced breakage of various sorts over the years, but nothing as fucked up as when the switch to systemd happened.
> (If so, have you filed these bugs with anyone?)
Sorry I don't have a lot of time for this. Usually when I have seen really bad issues running sid I just wait for them to get resolved after the next dist-upgrade or two. And that usually works well enough. Not this time though.
To be fair, if you're experiencing bugs in the testing distribution and not filing them, then you really have no right to complain when they're not resolved…
This is actually a common way that a lot of people run debian, or at least used to be last I checked. Often if you don't do this you get an old kernel version that doesn't work with the latest hardware. (I've built machines, put Debian stable on them, and the SATA controller is completely unrecognized, whereas unstable works.) I have been running Debian this way for a long time without any major complaints. For something as critical as boot, typically my expectations established by years of use is they don't fuck it up this badly, don't merge in piece of shit software and make everything else depend on it. That expectation was broken egregiously for the first time ever for me, during a period of ~15 years of use. I am not exaggerating when I say I have been a Debian fan for a long time and I really question where the quality is going.
But OK, you and others are entitled to think I'm being capricious and haven't thought it out.
Online harassment is harsh to handle. Death threats, stalking, threat of physical violence, and I can only imagine the look if a male developer went to the police and said that it is all because software he is developing on his spare time and giving out for free.
Cops' lives (in a particularly uncharitable interpretation) revolve around reinforcing their own masculinity by winning fights and exerting dominance. Using that to protect damsels in distress from creepy male others/sexual predators is a highly masculinity-reinforcing, fatherly/brotherly and desirable thing to do.
An effiminate man (using the again uncharitable notion that nerds with desk jobs are not manly in the eyes of police officers) walking into the station and asking for protection from other effiminate men is more likely to be seen as a pathetic whiner.
On average, 18% of police officers in a given department are female. It is more likely (5-1 odds) that the officer on your case will be male.
Of course you could also get a female cop, just as you could get a male cop who takes the complaint seriously. Parent asked why the victim's gender matters; this is a reason why it is not entirely irrelevant.
The police department handed the information from Anita Sarkeesian to the FBI for investigation. The FBI has an ongoing investigation, have approached IGDA and together with bullying experts are working on the complaints.
I think very few cases has had such large impact as the one reported by Anita Sarkeesian.
Huh? The Norwegian police is still a police force (so they're naturally going to be slightly corrupt regarding the behavior of themselves/other police), and occasionally racist/evil - but they're actually pretty good compared to the police forces almost anywhere else in the world.
I don't see how being a white male in Norway would impact your criminal complaint in any negative way AT ALL.
It should be obvious to anyone that RedHat has a vested interest in making the vast majority of Linux distributions dependent on technology it controls. Linux is its bread-and-butter.
It appears RedHat has realised that, through systemd, it can readily provide preferential support for its own projects, and place roadblocks up for projects it does not control, thus extending its influence broadly and quickly. By using tenuous dependencies amongst its own projects it can speed adoption even faster.
Once it has significant influence, and the maintainers of competing projects have drifted away either out of frustration or because they are starved of oxygen, RedHat knows that they can effectively take Linux closed-source by restricting access to documentation and fighting changes that are not in their own best interests.
At this point, they can market themselves as the only rational choice for corporate Linux support -- and this would be perfectly reasonable because they would have effective control of the ecosystem.
Linux (as in a full OS implementation) is an extremely complex beast and you can't just "fork it" and start your own 'distro' from scratch anymore -- you would have to leverage a small army to do it, then keep that army to maintain it. It's just not practical.
At the same time, Linux has matured to the point of attaining some measure of corporate credibility, and from RedHat's point of view, it no longer needs its 'open source' roots to remain viable. RedHat also, understandably, fears potential competition.
Through systemd and subsequent takeovers of other ecosystem components, RedHat can leverage its own position while stifling potential competition -- this is a best-case scenario for any corporation. It will have an advantage in the marketplace, potential customers will recognise that advantage, and buy its products and support contracts.
I hope you can understand why many see this as an extremely compelling case. Arguing that RedHat has 'ethics' and would 'never do such a thing' is immature and silly -- RedHat is a corporation, it exists to profit from its opportunities, just like any other company. To attempt to argue that it would not do so is contrary to what we can assume is its default state.
It's no 'conspiracy theory' to assume that a corporation will behave like a corporation; arguing that it is just makes one look like a naive child. systemd is one large step toward RedHat gaining the ability to reap what it has sewn -- for its benefit and not necessarily ours.
First, it develops almost everything out in the open. That includes developers communicating with their coworkers through public mailing lists for those projects. Sometimes those are hosted by Redhat but most often they are hosed by other projects governance (free desktop, kernel, openjdk). When it comes to those projects employees end up communicating on the list instead of internal or in person to make sure everybody has access to the communication. Most OSS ran by companies loved here on HN (Google, Fb, etc) has development happen on internal lists with occasional code dumps.
Second, for almost all projects started by Redhat employees do not require copy right assignment. Yes, I know Fedora has something for their project but that seams to be an exception. No copyright assignment on systemd or many gnome sub-projects they started. Compare that again to OSS from Google, FB and even Ubuntu (upstart requires copy right assignment).
Third, and contrary to what you just said... YES YOU CAN FORK IT. It happens all the time. People build one person distros all the time (or obscure distros with a small group of volunteers). Hell, somebody even forked systemd (new project: useslessd) to remove things he considers bad.
So, in conclusion, what you call a compelling case is nothing more then argument on thin ice... at least in my eyes given the evidence. Technically they can exert control over the projects if they employ the maintainer. But, given the facts they not setup in a position to exploit it and given the current status quo we should see it coming.
I'm not affiliated with Redhat; I don't run Redhat; I know some people who work / worked at Redhat in past.
"At this point, they can market themselves as the only rational choice for corporate Linux support..."
I'm not sure how relevant this is to Debian.
Its current, official support window of "through 1 year after the release of the next version" (with an additional LTS experiment for squeeze at the moment) is just too short for corporations running Linux in production, especially if you get started anywhere near the release of the next version. E.g. right now I'm helping a non-profit corporation upgrade from squeeze to wheezy, and the prospect of doing that again in less than two years means it probably won't be moving to jessie.
How many orgs out there are really happy with Debian's short support windows?
I don't really know any of the back story of this guy, but having been on the receiving end of similar poor behaviour myself, it's easy to see why he would be walking away.
This malicious behaviour is not okay out of anyone - leader or follower. When I was a kid, my parents asked me to consider the position: If my friend told me to stick my finger in the fire, would I? For those that shrug and blame it on Linus, I ask you also to consider that position; you're not 4, you're capable of critical thought. Stop being a dick and blaming it on others. You being a dick is on you, period.
I don't care if this is the example set by Linus himself - just because he does that, does not grant you leave to behave that way too. If he acts that way, I will consider him a dick. If you do that, I consider you a dick. I don't look at you, shrug my shoulders and say "Hey, I don't blame you, I blame Linus for setting a bad example." I judge him for his behaviour and for acting that way while being in a position of influence. I judge you for bad behaviour as well as bad judgment for considering that you can blame someone else for your own bad behaviour.
If you're working in a community that has garnered a reputation for poor behaviour because of its leaders and/or constituents, don't become that, you're better than that. If your leaders are like that, don't be scared to call them out. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour, I don't care who it's from. Respect garners respect. If you're a dick to people, you don't deserve respect. It's okay to hold people accountable, it's okay to hold them to high standards, but stop being a dick. That's not okay.
Seems that Godwin's Law needs to be updated for 2014. As online discussion grows longer, the probability of doxxing and death threats approaches 1. And the standard corollary is the side which doxxes and issues death threats first automatically loses the argument.
[Disclaimer: I helped with the evaluation and drafting of this particular TC decision, to try to mitigate any potential fallout, and make sure that this particular decision didn't cause any harm; in particular, I wrote clause 3 and 4 of the decision, and suggested what turned into clause 6. However, I think Anthony Towns has it right: "The tech ctte could've addressed this issue by providing policy guidance or by just offering advice, and assuming that the systemd maintainers would act on the advice or policy in good faith. Choosing to override the systemd maintainers was far from the most friendly available option."]
"This is what many still (retorically) wonder about: we the systemd maintainers did not reject that change, so it is not clear (or, it is) why the TC had to be involved."
It isn't about this one decision, either; as with the previous TC decision, this is more the last straw. Maintaining systemd is a difficult enough task without heaps of people piling on.
"I don't agree with them (at least not fully), but my resignation from the maintainer team is not about people being skeptical, it's about personal attacks, it's about death wishes from project members and it's about people escalating conflicts instead of trying to resolve them."
Seriously, people sending _death wishes_ to developer or maintainers of software who's decisions/directions they disagree with? They need to be publicly named so I can easily find that out when I Google them when their CV hits my desk. That's _so_ not OK. I would refuse to have those people on any team of mine - no matter how excellent your grades, no matter how lofty your achievements, your CV just gets thrown out, you won't even get a call back explaining why.
While I respect your decision to throw out the CVs of people engaging in hatred and death wishes (of course... I think most people would do this), I'm not sure many of these people will be applying to your Australian web strategy company.
In other words, your post came off as a bit self important.
I certainly didn't intend to imply I'm head of HR aT Google or SpaceX, but at he same time it wasn't intended to be about me (and turning it around that way the judging it based on 3 a year out of date HN bio or LinkedIn profile still doesn't make it about me).
How do you suggest that "we" (these people's peers) should deal with behavior like hat?
Given they're active on the list in question and while the content crossed a line, the style was not out of character, nor was it later claimed to have been posted by somebody else, so I think we can rule this out.
Why not publish the offending emails? As it is, those who threatened you face no repercussions. Their tactic worked, and they have every incentive to visit abuse upon others in the future.
Edit: Thank you. I was under the impression that the emails were addressed specifically to you, not a mailing list.
They're on debian-devel, and I'm sure the hivemind fill find them quickly enough, but sure: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/05/msg00585.html (and yes, they got pushback, but it took approximately that much until people said WTF).
Thorsten has always been a jerk. I don't think systemd is a new trigger, but it's interesting to see him show up (though I'm not surprised). He used to haunt the OpenBSD lists a decade ago, but was basically sent packing after all his "contributions" were rejected.
That is not the point here, neither in my resignation or my blog post. Something being controversial does not mean it's ok to be a dick to the people pushing for it, which is the core of what I'm trying to say.
So far, the last two TC decisions have been two-for-two in driving developers away; the previous one was the last straw that caused Joey Hess to leave.
The TC had nothing to do with this particular developer leaving, and it is disingenuous as hell to suggest it. He is leaving the systemd package maintenance team at Debian because of threats and personal attacks, despite supporting the team.
Get over it. It's childish and pathetic now. Death threats to the creator. Personal attacks to volunteers. You have carried a debate into the extreme to where it is no longer noble.
Just leave. Just stop. You are not welcome anymore in the community.
The problem is that the decent people who dislike systemd don't deserve that criticism, and the deranged people who issue death threats will ignore it.
Same issue as #GamerGate in that game "journalism" really is completely broken but now you can't talk about that without being lumped in with a bunch of vocal minority crazed misogynists.
It's very easy to talk about game "journalism" without being lumped into the "vocal minority". Just talk about game "journalism" without sticking up for the hopeless "GamerGate" brand, and be careful not to bring up game "journalism" in discussions about gender parity.
I get your point, yet I also see why that would be impossible from the GamerGate point of view considering how the media for the most part covered GamerGate in a biased one-sided way.
Don't get me wrong, I don't support GamerGate (or the other side) at all. Yet, all gamers aren't women-hating misogynists, despite the reporting.
The problem is that GamerGate was created as part of a harassment campaign, explicitly billed as a propaganda tool, and never had a coherent message or structure, neither of which is necessary for a PR operation.
This meant that while the media coverage was generally accurate there are GamerGate supporters who aren't aware of the true origins and now incorrect feel that they were misrepresented — precisely the kind of distraction the original 4chan / burgersandfries cadre were hoping for.
See, you stuck up for "GamerGate", and now I think you're one of those people who believe that Zoe Quinn's private life is everyone's business because "ethics in journalism".
And is that my fault or is it the fault of the coverage of GamerGate?
Please note that I don't side with either of the sides, both sides are acting stupidly and I would rather spend time browsing TMZ than to engage in the stupid flamewar.
See, you paint people with a broad brush, and now I think you're one of those people who don't bother thinking before they post in a mean way because "fuck you got mine" and "karma to burn".
Or #shirtgate when idiot "journalist" (The Atlantic's Rose Eveleth) went ballistic over Philae ESA Project Scientist Matt Taylor's shirt.
Matt had a shirt on with women similar to WWII bomber girls, fully clothed in 1940s/1950s style corsets or as Rose Eveleth and her foaming at the mouth outraged Twitter followers say they are naked women.
A lot of people conveniently ignore that the shirt was actually made by a female friend of his named Elly Prizeman. The situation all of a sudden becomes completely different when you factor in that fact.
I was aware of that but didn't mention it because it's not relevant to the question of whether that was a good wardrobe choice when representing you and your colleagues’ professional work for international media coverage.
Most of the online criticism came her tweet about it going viral, or is that too simple of an explanation? You're right though, Chris Plante should share a bunch of that shame for his hyperbolic article, which also got shared everywhere and set the tone for discussion.
Sure you can: just talk about journalism without mentioning GamerGate. That label was created to co-opt an existing issue as cover for attacks on specific women – the only reason to mention it would be if you wanted muddy the waters instead.
I didn't mean to downplay the impact when I used the word minority, there certainly are a lot of people on that loony bandwagon, but relative to the total community of gamers (not just the subset of those whose public internet identities on YouTube or whatever self-identify as "gamer") I would have to assume they are a very, very small minority since a lot of people are gamers, and most people (while sexist to varying degrees, as are we all) aren't abusive women-haters, in my experience.
Also, it looks like you might be getting downvotes (due to the coloring of your comment when I viewed it anyway). Wasn't me, I upvoted you fwiw.
You're just going to end up (as tptacek has already done) with people talking past each other about different definitions of what GG is, what it isn't, what gaming is, what gaming isn't, whether or not rape and death threats are inherently sexist or threatening, and so on and so forth.
Game journalism is traditionally very weak, with journalists routinely feeling beholden to game manufacturers who use both positive reinforcement (expanded access to demos, invitations to special events, access to interview subjects, exclusive prerelease info) and negative reinforcement (especially the withdrawal of previously described perks) to coerce games journalists into providing very favorable reviews.
Only a very small minority of games journalists are truly unbiased, as the vast majority depend on access granted voluntarily by publishers to get the info that drives the traffic they need to make a living. They're often little more than an extension of game publishers PR departments.
Unfortunately it's very hard to solve this problem, as there's no way to force a publisher to share helpful access to critical reviewers.
Also, one time a game publisher had sex with people in the game industry which proves that all women are whores.
I've downvoted you because your post is inflammatory and off-topic. I actually have no opinion on the issue, since I barely know what it's about (nor do I really care to know).
I assume you mean the hatred and ugly talk needs to stop. With that I will agree and can see no reason anyone would think it a good idea to engage in this kind of behavior.
But this is not necessarily the dislike and rejection of systemd. These are not the same thing. Nor does the fact some people are behaving badly make systemd any more preferable to me.
Pottering's accusations that Linus somehow is responsible for the all the ugliness is over the top also IMHOP.
Again, not condoning ugly talk and specifically ill wishes. This is far behind acceptable behavior. But I don't like the idea behind systemd. I am worried about it growing. I don't need systemd. I don't want systemd. But as long as there are alternatives, I don't really care if others do.
I don't have a horse in this race, but isn't it a good idea to as they say: 'don't give them a reason to hate you'.
From what I've seen the good intentions behind systemd were marred by the fact that when it was announced the (mostly skeptical) responses to it were met by systemd supporters who held the attitude 'we're saving nix, join us or nix dies', and this has created the current atmosphere of debate.
While these death threats and the like are in no doubt horrible, it seems that some bridges need to be built between the people who support systemd and those who do not, because the attitudes on both sides of the argument are rather poor, and this makes the open source community look even worse.
Edit: I said nothing about systemd users currently making threats, rather that their attitude at the beginning of the project at some level caused the response that we see today. They are not completely to blame, as are not the people who are against systemd and do not send death threats. Regardless, it seems that recently, HN only supports the idea of 'there is no gray, only black and white'. People like these are the reason why the systemd creators cannot engage in debate, because on both sides the people who shout the loudest win out over the reasonable voices.
I'm pretty certain that when someone actually tries to hire an assassin to murder the creator of a free software project simply because they disagree with said software project, things have gone way, way too far.
People who support systemd are not launching personal attacks, calling for physical harm against non-systemd supporters. This is a unidirectional attack. And it needs to stop.
>when someone actually tries to hire an assassin to murder the creator of a free software projec
Has this ever been substantiated? From my understanding, the "death threats" were more along the lines of people saying awful things like "I hope Lennart gets run over", not "I am hiring someone to shoot you". Lennart made a comment about a bitcoin collection, but provided no actual proof. Personally, I'm skeptical - I've seen quite a bit of vitriol about systemd, but never anyone campaigning for bitcoins to hire a hitman. It seems like a rather easy way to bring a lot of discredit to your detractors.
Even the former is obviously not acceptable, but no one is being done any favors if we suddenly conflate an offhand mean spirited comment with actual death threats or attempts on someone's life.
It's obviously a joke and not an actual attempt to hire a hitman. They shortly after proceed to talk about how Red Hat has replacement clones if anything were to happen, anyway.
Is it a shitty joke? yes. Is it mean spirited? Yes. Is it the same thing as actually trying to have someone kill the man? No.
Making it a "systemd critics" issue will just alienate sane people from the debate. Disliking systemd is not a club, requiring approval for membership. Even if this is a one-sided issue, that doesn't mean it's an issue of the whole side.
His name was on a fallacious bitcoin "assassination market" only accessible over Tor, basically just a website you could submit names to, with an associated bitcoin address. An obvious scam to glean free bitcoin. The hit man claim is complete horse shit.
Oh! I assumed "tried" implied "tried and failed", but it seems the effort is ongoing? I guess the shutdown of Silk Road 2.0 will delay things for a while.
What was it that Gandhi said? First you sneer at people, then you lie to people, then when caught out you make up stories to try to get sympathy? Wasn't that it?
I too will offer solidarity and hopefully absorb some of the downvotes. I don't know who is downvoting you; your points seem quite reasonable. It is unclear that actual death threats have been made. In either case, this is irrelevant to the technical merit of systemd. We should not let valid criticisms of systemd be derailed by inappropriate focusing on death threats, which is a separate issue from hating systemd for technical reasons.
I can see that systemd as a piece of software has many benefits. However, as a software project, the attitude as you mention, is a major problem. In my one single minor interaction with systemd people, I already agree with this criticism:
"My experiences with systemd's Debian maintainers (and, indirectly,
systemd's upstream) have been far from satisfactory in this regard.
Instead of taking a flexible approach, and being willing to provide a
range of glue facilities and approaches for different daemon
upstreams, the systemd community seems doctrinaire. Daemon authors
are expected to do as they are told by systemd upstream, rather than
systemd upstream making things comfortable for daemon developers.
This counts as a "technical reason". Though not directly about the software itself, a project with such an attitude should not be relied on because the people in control do not have your best interests in the long run.
"While these death threats and the like are in no doubt horrible..." Then let's stop there.
No bridge is sacred enough to warrant physical threats when burned. No attitude poor enough to elicit the response that this did. It's bloody software.
You don't like it, you fork the last version you did and start from there. If enough people agree with you, you'll be fine. If not, you are probably wrong.
Amen. Actually that would have been the better outcome anyway since it adds entropy to the gene pool. Cross pollination of ideas could have benefitted both parties. And even if your side doesn't take the cake, enough people would have flocked to the source that we could have fixed some bugs and resolved potential security issues due to the addition of more eyes.
Looking from afar, you'd think this was some tiff over imaginary lines on a map or something. Now that would be silly.
Gentoo is waiting to welcome all the systemD haters.
OpenRC is going strong.
We also support systemD as well because USE flags rock.
In fact being able to see the sysV and systemD init files side by site was what finally convinced me it is an improvement. An improvement with many questionable additions... Like free money attached with losing my 25/20 eyesight to normal 20/20 or some other minor debilitating affliction.
Having used Zypper, Yum, Apt, and Pacman, I'd have to rank them pacman > zypper > apt > yum. Have you tried the others? Apt syntax is so cumbersome using either the Suse or Arch package manager.
Beside the maintainer painful time, I find it interesting. We always see that FOSS is about freedom, if you don't agree, you can pick your own, fork, adapt ... except when a change impacts too much. The whole ecosystem is now changing forcing people to accept something too different, that's how things ends up emotional.
No, they have not. Some random asshats have done what random asshats have always done. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got death threats when he killed off Sherlock Holmes. This is not some new thing or some internet thing. These are not people who were ever involved in a debate for them to carry over into something more extreme. They were never part of the community. This desire to blame other people for someone else's actions is immoral and dishonest.
Wish I could get over it. But every time some random process fails to start at boot time I...well I cry a little knowing this is what we are now stuck with.
With all of the valid criticisms of systemd, you've chosen an imaginary one. Systemd provides better process handling and failure reporting than the initscripts it replaces (and mostly better than upstart, as well).
Agreed. I maintain my stance as a critic of systemD but it's better than what we had before.
I've very little to criticise it as an init system... My criticism falls more towards the issues of "why is this all in one process not task specific child processes launched by a core init process" and "why can't you make this work on BSD" and "why the f%*^# hell are you building kdbus... Please stop killing the kittens"
But why should someone writing for Linux think about OpenBSD? Are you saying every piece of BSD software runs on Linux? Go try telling Linus that you want a BSD compatible kernel.
Systemd does not run on BSD because of Cgroups and that is something the BSD maintainers don't want. Here's a small set of justifications why : systemd leverages core Linux infrastructure that has already diverged from OpenBSD
It's sort of funny for me how the systemd attitude towards portability is quite similar to that of the OpenBSD community, whose software (OpenSSH, OpenSMTPD, OpenBGPD...) generally runs on OpenBSD only and where porting is done by a separate team, but somehow the interwebs aren't full of rants calling the OpenBSD people jerks for not caring about non-OpenBSD platforms...
OpenSSH seems to be the best known of the bunch, and even then it is loosely couples to the rest of the system.
Systemd on the other hand is rightly couples to the Linux kernel (to the point that you may have to update systemd and the Linux kernel in lockstep), and its many sub-systems are tightly coupled to the existence of systemd-pid1.
This makes systemd a whole other beast from OpenSSH.
I really wondered whether people would sympathize with me or just flame me.
I guess I can explain my 'imaginary' problems a bit. Like normal people, I had several random things thrown in rc.local(set drive power settings,disable blue tooth on laptops, set raid sync rates,ect).
The first issue was, systemd never even executed this file. I had to go do random googling just to get it to execute.
After that, it was hit or miss on whether everything within the file would even get successfully executed. I'm guessing because some dependencies or modules aren't loaded yet, which shouldn't matter since rc.local is normally ran last. Sure, I could take each individual command and make its own init file which is what systemd docs recommend over rc.local. But seriously, why should I have to go to that length to fix something that has been working fine for 15 years?
"I really wondered whether people would sympathize with me or just flame me."
It was not my intention to flame you. From your tone and sparse message, I assumed you were making yet another unfounded accusation about systemd; so many people on both sides (but mostly on the anti-systemd side) have been making ridiculous and untrue statements so often and for so long that I tend to just expect random made up nonsense to fly with reckless abandon. In your case, you have had a bad usability experience with systemd; and I can't deny your experience. I wasn't there.
That said, it is my understanding that rc.local continues to work fine on systems that choose to enable the compatibility layer. Fedora is my desktop and laptop OS of choice, and I don't think I did anything to make my rc.local files work. I don't use them for much, but I do have some custom hard disk spin down times and such setup on one of my machines, which continued to function after upgrading to a systemd-based version.
If your distro opted not to enable the compatibility layer by default, I suspect there's an easy way to do it yourself with a single command line or installation of a package.
Our servers all run CentOS and we've put a couple of new CentOS 7 systems online recently, and while we don't have any rc.local bits running on them, we do still have a few old style initscripts (in our products, embarrassingly enough, even though our bootup and shutdown module supports systemd and upstart, we still ship initscripts to start our own stuff), and they have continued to function correctly on CentOS 7.
In short, it has not been my experience that doing things the old way has been dramatically cut off for people who need to continue doing so for the time being. In my, admittedly limited, experience, I haven't noticed any difference except the "service" command now recommends systemctl when you run it.
In the end, I have had to rewrite my init scripts for custom stuff and do extra work and I am left wondering why I even tried it in the first place. The only speed difference (which from what I can tell is the only reason anyone uses systemd) I have seen is on my desktop machine. Start up is way faster, and shut downs too. Although strangely shutdowns hang randomly for over a minute sometimes. But on my laptops, I have noticed no difference.
In summary, systemd has not simplified my life. I am not really sure what the rave about it even is. And no, I am not the one threatening the developers. I really don't care enough. I just find it odd that so many praise it so heavily, and I don't feel that way at all. I also know of no sysadmins that are looking forward to its global rollout....
> The only speed difference (which from what I can tell is the only reason anyone uses systemd)
Not even close. To the extent it improves performance, that's a nice side effect. For me, personally, it means a few lines of .service instead of a pile of init.d, service supervision when services unexpectedly exit, easy log integration to see what services are up to, and unified activation of services by a variety of means (socket, bus, path, dependency, etc).
In the long run, having a unified interface to every service on the system is a win. In the short run, we find ourselves with semi-broken, or somewhat less than ideal, tooling and interfaces and a reasonably large amount of learning friction where there was a low amount before.
I've been a UNIX/Linux system administrator coming up on 20 years now (professionally since about '99), and I understand the pain. It's hard to break the habits of all that time; it's always worked before. In a pinch we've always been able to stick some shell commands somewhere and have it fire up the stuff we wanted to fire up.
But, it's nice to have one "thing" to ask questions of that will tell us a significant amount of data about the state of our system. It's something Windows Server has had for a long time (for Microsoft-provided core stuff; third party stuff has always sucked way worse than the state of things on Linux has ever been), and was arguably one of the (very few) reasons one might choose Windows over Linux on a server.
I have reservations about systemd. It's big, seemingly over-engineered and intrusive into places that init never went, and does some things in seemingly fragile ways (someone else mentioned that dependencies failing can lead to failure to boot, which is not something init ever really had a problem with). But, it's better than init, on nearly every axis. And, it is the new de facto standard.
So, I will learn it. I will work to make all the software I work on (which has an installed base in the millions, in the case of Webmin) work well with it. And, I'll probably even come to like it, eventually.
" we find ourselves with semi-broken, or somewhat less than ideal, tooling and interfaces and a reasonably large amount of learning friction where there was a low amount before"
Yes! Exactly! When you start breaking people's stuff that was working you will certainly not be getting compliments!
You're not stuck with anything. Any major transition will have bugs that need to be ironed out. In a year or two, assuming you don't switch to Slackware, it will be more reliable than sysvinit.
Major transitions do inevitably have issues, but that doesn't mean they're all equally painful. Systemd folks have definitely not done a great job of easing the transition, both on the technical side with interoperability with existing tools and configurations, and on the human-interaction factors of project management and marketing.
If systemd is that bad, where is The Distro Without systemd?
You know, the Linux distro that sets itself apart from the rest by Not Having systemd. Just... not having it. Going with SysV init or BSD init or Something Which Is Not systemd.
Because I don't see one, which implies it isn't that bad.
How did we get here? Because people on the internet continually use this highly charged language without regard. It is high time we as a community (at least on HN) commit to stop using such language.
We don't need to use such language. We don't need it. We can easily make our points without it. For example:
> "stuck"? There are many alternatives to systemd. There are many distributions which do not use it.
While keeping with the intent, this replacement no longer uses the violent language and also no lessens the attack on the parent commenter.
We should in general:
1. Not use violent language
2. Not attack commenters
3. Use non-adversarial language whenever possible.
Whatever the original problem was or the top link that is just not a viable solution. It is like saying "you don't have use libc, write your own". Or "Fine, Linus is a jerk, don't use the kernel, install minix but stop criticizing linux".
Let's say I follow the advice and apt-get remove systemd from Ubuntu 14.10. It doesn't look good. It takes along with it gnome-session, gvfs, nautilus, network-manager, pulseaudio, ubunt-desktop, softare-center, update-manager, update-notifier and others. Have you tried doing, maybe I am doing something wrong and there is a easier way to replace it.
Perhaps. I was an early adopter. I switched because the news at the time was indeed, debian is switching and there will be no alternatives. It seems their will be some alternatives at least in the next release. Not sure about after that though. But too late, I already converted everything, not converting back.
I've been thinking about pasting this news into my Facebook. Three times, erased each time.
"Guy gets multiple death threats because of the program he wants to start his computer is different from another program other people want to start their computers."
This isn't a hilarious nerd fight. This is some really misguided people who don't know how to communicate.
No, it's more, 'guy gets multiple death threats[1] because he wishes to make it immensely more difficult for other people to use the program they want to start their computers, and also worsen the stability of the computers of those who use his preferred program.'
[1] Has he gotten death threats, or simply death wishes? There's a big difference between threatening someone's life and, believing him to be a net-negative to the world, being pleased when he dies.
Death threats, death wishes... it's over an init daemon on a software project.
I can't imagine "Someone wants to paint the front door RED?! They should die." happening under any circumstances. It's concerning to me, on many levels, that this is happening over systemd, regardless of the technical benefits or issues.
Death threats are wrong. Victims aren't to blame for death threats. On the other hand, that doesn't do anything to redeem systemd or dismiss criticism of systemd.
Unfortunately, now the meme will be that critics of systemd are dangerous lunatics because of the death threats that most critics of systemd never made or approved of. This (and procedural irregularities, etc.) exemplify the ugly "total war" tone that was instrumental in pushing systemd through. The death threats are inexcusable. But the poor tone and bitter feelings have roots in what was done to get systemd where it is today.
And if you are telling critics of systemd, who have nothing to do with death threats that "[they] are not welcome anymore in the community" - you are not contributing to the improvement of the tone. You are waging total war.