[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Friday, October 15, 2021 at 12:55:18 AM UTC+13, chris wrote:
>
> On 10/14/21 01:29, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>> 
>> There are no such things as “power grabs” in Free software.
>
> Perhaps, but the amount of money and effort that Red Hat (now owned 
> by IBM btw) put into Linux means they have disproportionate amount of 
> influence in the direction of the project.

If you want to look at which is the single biggest company that is contributing to Linux, that would have to be Microsoft.

Which is the most popular Linux distro in the world today? Hard to tell, but it isn’t anything from Red Hat. Ubuntu most likely, and they are certainly getting very cosy with Microsoft.

> They are not the only 
> ones, but once big business get involved, then commercial interests, 
> rather than pursuit of excellence, will will always take precedence.

Again, you don’t understand the economics of how Free software works. If you don’t like the way a project is going, you are free to fork the source and take it in a different direction. As Devuan did with Debian.

Linux has always been about the pursuit of excellence: Linus Torvalds and his trusted lieutenants see to that. Look at his reception to the idea of using Rust to implement parts of the kernel.

> Well, you are free to choose.

And so are you.

> I can understand the initial motivation 
> for systemd, in terms of orderly system service and process startup, 
> just think the approach was wrong.

Fine. Show us a better approach. Enough with the hand-waving arguments! BPut your coding skills where your mouth is, as it were.

> Good design is lightweight, whereas Linux is starting to sink under the 
> weight of it's own complexity.

And yet Linux is still able to run happily on lightweight hardware. How lightweight? How about the original generation 1, single-core Raspberry π? How about the elderly Motorola 68K architecture, which is still in the source tree?

> ... and you can easily display entries in any
>> timezone, just by setting “TZ=«timezone»” at the front of the command. 
>>>
> All machines here are set to UTC, so the point is ?.

That you can easily display entries in any timezone, just by setting “TZ=«timezone»” at the front of the command. 

>>> Linux is far too bloated and all things to all men these days, rather than a 
>>> technically efficient OS. 
>> 
>> I don’t why you say that, when it has always been possible to build custom kernels
>> that include only the features that you need. Remember, it runs happily on something
>> as low-powered as the Raspberry π. 
> >
> Well, do occasionally rebuild kernels, but an OS is here primarily to 
> enable productive work, not spend all day configuring or debugging it. 

In other words, you prefer to complain rather than to take effective action about it.

>> Seems like their development is mainly dominated by one company these days, with
>> perhaps a less-than-admirable attitude to code quality and
>> security<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-license-violations-and-bad-code-freebsd-13s-close-call/> ...
> 
> Not at all. Try reading the whole article, rather than cherry 
> picking :-). Had you done so, you would realise that the company 
> and individual concerned have been dropped from the project.

Umm, Netgate dropped from FreeBSD? But they practically *are* FreeBSD. And which “individual”? There are a number of individuals associated with the company, who have done dubious things as reported in the article.  Which you did read the whole of, didn’t you?

> The fact that FreeBSD is embedded in so much commercial network kit, 
> also used by Apple OSX in the past, speaks volumes.

I guess “past” being the operative word here. Apple diverged from BSD a long time ago, and the non-copyleft licence allows them to go on taking without giving back.

> Designed by engineers, for engineers :-)... 

I am told that the pfSense developers have admitted that, were they to start again today, they would use Linux as the basis of their product, not FreeBSD. Back in the day, the BSDs had the high-performance, configurable network stack that others envied, but not any more.