I wrote:
On Mon, 16 Feb 2015 12:35:30 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
"The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarization of the GNU/Linux community that is remarkably similar to the monopolistic power position wielded by Microsoft in the late 1990s."
What a load of bullshit.
To those who may not understand the background to this, systemd is a project, headed by Lennart “PulseAudio” Poettering, to modernize the Linux system startup mechanism. It hasn’t been the only such project, but it does seem to be technically the most sophisticated. What some people don’t like is that it seems to be spreading its tentacles into more and more corners of system functionality, in order to properly manage startup and shutdown of all your system services. Also it is Linux-only: Poettering has no interest in making the code portable to the BSDs, for example. This in itself doesn’t seem to me to be a bad thing, but some others disagree. A major effort was launched to try to topple Debian’s decision <https://lwn.net/Articles/618277/> to go with systemd. This effort proved unsuccessful. So the losers went off in a huff to found their own fork of Debian. And good luck to them. But to try to describe widespread adoption of systemd among major distros (even Ubuntu has abandoned <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316> its home-grown “upstart” project in favour of systemd) as anything like “monopolistic power position wielded by Microsoft” is, to me, a step too far. People using terms like that are stupid mischief-makers, and a lot of them cannot even coherently explain why they hate systemd. As they say: “Do Not Feed The Trolls”. End of story.