FREE SOFTWARE IS BUSINESS (RE: ZLG) ZLG recently posted a long piece about the politics of free software and why it shouldn't/can't be ignored: gopher://zlg.space:70/0/articles/Software/./free-software-is-politics.txt gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7ezlg/0036_free-software-is-politics.txt It starts around the topic of Systemd adoption being debated in the Alpine Linux community. The endless Systemd debate is definitely political, I agree (and I'm on ZLG's side, against it, as well), but I think the interesting thing is the force behind it. Here I'm not talking specifically about Red Hat, but in general about commercial interests in the Linux ecosystem. In short you've got the divergents, key examples being Apple and Google, who took free UNIX code as the basis for their own Operating Systems but developed them independently from that point. Then you've got the collaborators, in particular Red Hat and SuSE, who made Linux itself their product, taking market share away from the old, proprietary, commercial UNIX systems. The divergents need to maintain a complete software environment for their derrived OSs, funded by hardware sales (of hardware which, as it happens, usually doesn't have very good support in Linux). On the other hand the collaborators have a lot of work done for them by all the different companies and individuals contributing to both the Linux kernel itself, and the huge variety of software running atop it. With things like X, they've even been using code originally written in large part by the old commercial UNIX companies that they (to some extent) replaced. The trouble is that they want to build the best product to suit their particular clients, who don't represent Linux users as a whole. So if they decide that their clients are best (or most cheaply, in terms of development costs) served by changing a basic feature of Linux distros such as the init or windowing system, the only way they can pull this off while retaining the advantage of having other people write and debug code that works in combination with it, is to push for its widespread adoption. If they don't achieve this, then they'll just end up with their own equivalent of Apple's Darwin or Google's Android, started from other people's code but relying entirely on their own programmers to move it forward down a separate path. So maybe for users things like Systemd adoption are political issues, but for a Red Hat software project team it's a matter of existance. If they develop something like Systemd and _can't_ get it into the wider Linux ecosystem, then it doesn't get integrated into the collaberative environment that they're relying on. Other people don't design their software to integrate with it, don't write tutorials for it, and generally leave it up to Red Hat to make everything work themselves. Red Hat don't have anything like the money of Google or Apple, so in the long run they can't afford to let that sort of divergence take root. The benefits from commercial collaborators in the Linux ecosystem flow both ways of course. With X for example, Red Hat filled a gap from the big corporations such as Sun, DEC, and IBM, who once contributed to the open-source reference X implementaion from which their proprietary X servers (and the free XFree86) were derrived, in order to maintain compatibility. Now that the Red Hat developers have all moved over to Wayland, the Xorg server's future currently relies on a release manager working in his spare time for Patreon donations: https://www.patreon.com/p12tic In this regard the opinions of users, and even individual developers, are easily overwhelmed by the basic power of a company paying developers to work on stuff. Whatever politics goes on in the mailing lists and forums, the commodity of open-source software is code, and while collaborating, people are also selling their code in exchange for influence. As well as a political environment it is a market environment, producing for some a free device to serve a function they need themselves, and for others a product they can sell on for profit (even by the indirect means of commercial support). So far this hasn't worked out all that badly. I don't like Systemd or PulseAudio but I can generally avoid them. Though edge cases do creep in such as setting up a VPS with a service that only offers Systemd-based distro images for use, and Firefox offering better support for PulseAudio sound than ALSA. But free open-source software is still young as a concept, and it's not clear whether the balance of power (which here is the balance of code) will remain steady, so that the options for users remain open. - The Free Thinker.