Re:IBM acquires Red Hat
by severino on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:54PM
(#18323126)
Now talking seriously, even if IBM stopped funding the project, it wouldn't be such a disaster. First of all, it's open source. A new mantainer could take over the project (for free) so the distributions can keep using it. But even if a replacement had to be found, the process wouldn't be traumatic... just like when Debian, the base of many other distributions, adopted systemd some years ago.
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A new maintainer could take over the project, but Red Hat was funding their labor, and the chances that someone takes over the project and continues contributing regularly goes up significantly if their labor is reliably funded. (Working for a large company is not the only way to fund labor, but it seems to be the most common one in our society.)
Similarly, having something worth switching to also depends on labor to develop such an alternative. Upstart is no longer funded, and was the closest (including in terms of mindshare that caused people to spend labor developing integration between their software and the init system).
That's right, but we've plenty of "plumbing" software for the Linux ecosystem whithout funding companies behind, and they get regular contributions.
The same should happen with the init system. Of course, it's different when the software pretends not just to be an init system but also a replacement for tons of other daemons like cron, inetd, networking, etc, making it a huge piece of software. But maybe that's the problem in the first place.
The point there is that most of the underlying user space plumbing of modern Linux system is in fact funded by Red Hat in one way or another.
(And in this context it is probably useful to realize that on the kernel side of things the amount of funding from Red Hat and IBM is comparable)
If that's true, maybe we should stop relying so much on a single company like RedHat. Maybe we need to stop making so many distributions, and instead focus on the tools everybody use.
Re:IBM acquires Red Hat
by _emacsomancer_ on Sunday October 28, 2018 @07:32PM
(#18323880)
systemd is interesting and innovative. But I do question whether the most baroque of the modern inits should be the de facto standard init.