GPLv2 only says that people with access to the binary need access to the source code too. If they only used it internally they’d never have to make it public.

There were several cases of shenanigans from other Red Hat controlled projects yanking upstart configs and sysvinit scripts from their projects and replacing them exclusively with systemd units even though those configs had active maintainers (often people who worked at Canonical or Google). This made packaging those supposedly community owned but de facto Red Hat controlled projects more difficult for any system that didn’t use systemd, since the packagers had to scramble to find or recreate those files and then maintain patch series for them. They also very quickly jumped on adding systemd-specific integrations where similar integrations to make the services work better with upstart had been rejected because services weren’t supposed to favour an init system.

Something not necessarily (or provably) from Red Hat - a whole lot of misinformation about upstart suddenly started appearing on mailing lists and message boards when Debian was considering whether to use upstart or systemd. While I think they made the right decision to go with systemd, that sudden influx of new accounts complaining about upstart likely influenced the decision in ways I’m really not comfortable with.

I don’t dislike systemd. I’m happy to use it and think it works quite well for many (though definitely not all) of the things it does. But I am concerned about how it’s yet another case of Red Hat having a large amount of control over the Linux ecosystem and Red Hat controlled projects and the supporters of Red Hat projects using dirty tricks to further that control. And with systemd consuming more and more of how a Linux system works, I am concerned about the influence that gives Red Hat. Are we going to see systemd-packaged that manages your packages, but somehow the patches to make it work with non-RPM packages keep getting rejected or just held up for years at a time? (We’ve already seen similar things with xdg portals, where portals Red Hat wants get approved and merged very quickly, but portals proposed by Canonical or SuSE spend years “in review” with more and more petty changes requested, sometimes to be rejected because a Red Hat backed portal that only implements part of the functionality suddenly appeared and was approved within a week or two.)

I have my own problems with them, but off the top of my head I think the following tech companies all do better than Apple: Red Hat, Canonical, Framework, Purism, System76, Fairphone.

I have the following complaints about systemd:

1. It was created basically by lennart because after RHEL 6 did pretty much the worst implementation ever of upstart he got NIH syndrome about it
2. Red Hat played a lot of dirty politics early on to get systemd everywhere (my tinfoil hat theory is that Red Hat let Lennart’s NIH syndrome run away with it because they thought having more control over the init system would be beneficial)
3. It’s subsuming everything, often with no real benefit over what it replaces.

The first two aren’t actually issues with systemd, but rather are political issues I have around the way Red Hat bullies the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I’m not going to let that become a stopping point for my using what is actually a fairly good piece of tech. The third is actually an ongoing issue, but it’s not enough for me to try throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is, however, IMO a continuation of Red Hat’s sketchy political play.

Yeah everyone knows it’s kwe-SAD-il-uh.

Do the five of you get together for coffee?

I’ve been to many diners that do that consistently better than Waffle House.

Just do a bind mount?

I don’t understand how a transitional package that installs the snap (which is documented in the package description) is any different from a transitional package that replaces, say, ffmpeg with libav.

$ apt show firefox
Package: firefox
Version: 1:1snap1-0ubuntu5
Priority: optional
Section: web
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Mozilla Team <ubuntu-mozillateam@lists.ubuntu.com>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 124 kB
Provides: gnome-www-browser, iceweasel, www-browser, x-www-browser
Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd (>= 2.54)
Depends: debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0
Breaks: firefox-dbg (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-dev (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-geckodriver (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-mozsymbols (<< 1:1snap1)
Replaces: firefox-dbg (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-dev (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-geckodriver (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-mozsymbols (<< 1:1snap1)
Task: ubuntu-desktop-minimal, ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-full, xubuntu-desktop, lubuntu-desktop, ubuntustudio-desktop, ubuntukylin-desktop, ubuntukylin-desktop, ubuntukylin-desktop-minimal, ubuntu-mate-core, ubuntu-mate-desktop, ubuntu-budgie-desktop-minimal, ubuntu-budgie-desktop, ubuntu-budgie-desktop-raspi, ubuntu-unity-live, edubuntu-desktop-gnome-minimal, edubuntu-desktop-gnome, edubuntu-desktop-gnome-raspi, ubuntucinnamon-desktop-minimal, ubuntucinnamon-desktop
Download-Size: 77.3 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: no
APT-Sources: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble/main amd64 Packages
Description: Transitional package - firefox -> firefox snap
 This is a transitional dummy package. It can safely be removed.
 .
 firefox is now replaced by the firefox snap.

Isn’t that kinda the same with, for example, Fedora and Flatpaks? Or Debian and debs? Or Ubuntu and debs? Or Fedora and rpms?

The packaging system that your distro provides gets you the packages you get. For a small number of packages that were a maintenance nightmare, Ubuntu provides a transitional debs to move people over to the snaps (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird), but if you want to get it from another repo, you can do exactly what KDE Neon does by setting your preferences.

Canonical have made the same mistake three times as far as desktop environments are concerned, IMO:

1. 2004: went with GNOME
2. 2010: made Unity as a way to rid themselves of the hostility of the GNOME devs
3. 2017: Instead of leaving GNOME in the dust, they went back.

IMO using GNOME is an abusive relationship.

Nah, this is just the same “hivemind hates thing” leaking over from Reddit. It’s not that different to the systemd hate. There’s a core of a point, but if a small fraction of the energy spent on the daily Two Minutes Hate were redirected towards fixing the things those folks don’t like, they wouldn’t have any molehills to treat as mountains.

Repeating a debunked claim doesn’t make it true.

Any action, including inaction when you can act, is participating. I’m choosing the most effective way to minimise the harm.

Why are you trying to encourage people to take actions that have the result of making the situation worse? Why are you supporting more genocide?

I said harm reduction, not living in a fantasy world.

I will always use my vote to the maximum effect of harm reduction. Why aren’t you?

You’re very good at misrepresenting what people say. Are you saying that 2 genocides is not worse than 1 genocide?

Where on earth did you get that from my comment? If one genocide is bad, surely that same genocide (although arguably made more effective) plus an entirely separate, second genocide is worse?

Well purely on the genocide topic… While both major parties appear to be okay with one genocide, only one of them appears to want to do their own genocides within the US.

So your options are three people who have absolutely no chance of getting even a single electoral college vote, let alone a majority. Or in other words, to potentially feed the spoiler effect.

Being a single issue voter doesn’t make sense at the best of times, but when it means you’re voting for someone who has no chance of winning and potentially helping an even worse candidate get into office, it’s even worse. If we had ranked-choice voting on a nationwide count, it wouldn’t be as bad (and would be fine if after you’d voted for those candidates on the one issue you actually weighed in between the major candidates), but that’s sadly not the world in which we live.

Go ahead and vote third party if you’re in a state like Alabama where there’s no chance of a difference regardless. But in a swing state, third party votes can and do add up to lives lost.