Systemd has made it impossible for me to run an up-to-date Gnome on FreeBSD. That feels a lot like taking away my freedom.
The systemd project has no control over what Gnome relies on. They independently rely on systemd because it provides functionality that makes their lives easier, and it's their right to do that. If you want "up-to-date Gnome" to work on FreeBSD, go and write some code to help make it happen.
I could write patches that reimplement the functionality that Gnome gets from systemd using lower-level functionality, in a cross-platform way. But those patches would be rejected; the Gnome project has decided to use systemd and would not want to duplicate its code. If I were to maintain my own gnome fork I would have to convince distributions to adopt it.
I could write patches that add FreeBSD support to systemd. But those patches would be rejected - again, as a policy decision, systemd doesn't want to support FreeBSD. Thankfully in this case there is a fork, uselessd, but again, we need to convince distributions to adopt it or it's meaningless.
The claim that Gnome "independently" relies on systemd is specious; there was a lot of lobbying and politics from the systemd side. My only practical option is to counter at the same level, and lobby Gnome (and linux distributions) to make the political decision to move away from systemd.
So, Red Hat project GNOME relies on Red Hat project systemd, and Red Hat employees won't allow systemd to be portable to competing platforms. Convenient.
You can of course make the case that the interfaces provided by systemd are substandard, but so long as you don't have an alternative to offer, it's just talk.
As far as I know, Gnome does currently have fallbacks (with reduced functionality) on non-systemd systems, so it's not the case that they just ignore things. However, I perfectly understand why they would not bother with duplicating code just to support systems that aren't good enough.
EDIT: I'm apparently not able to respond to the reply below me for whatever reason, but... It's been said many times that making systemd portable makes no sense, which is why it provides interfaces. And regarding the interfaces, which part of them, exactly, are not stable? There's a very reasonable interface stability promise, which to my knowledge has held, so far.
Considering GNOME is part of the new school design philosophy in general and largely developed by Red Hat employees, it's inevitable that it would have happened anyway, but the systemd developers were directly complicit in speeding it up.
> systemd is Linux-only. That means if we still care for those non-Linux > platforms replacements have to be written. In case of the timezone/time/locale/hostname mechanisms this should be relatively easy > as we kept the D-Bus interface very much independent from systemd, and > they are easy to reimplement. Also, just leaving out support for this on those archs should be workable too. The hostname interface is documented > in a lot of detail here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/hostnamed -- we plan to > offer similar documentation for the other mechanisms.
I'm really not seeing any foul play anywhere; RH tried Upstart (they even used it in RHEL6), found it lacking, and out of that came systemd.
The thing is, the systemd project is far more ambitious (which is good) and not content with just providing an init system. I personally don't see anything wrong with that (a well-integrated core userland for all Linux distros? Yes please), but you obviously do.
I think your project is ultimately not going to gain much traction it's simply ignoring most of the goals of the systemd project. It might have side-effects on how systemd develops though, but I can't really say.
It seems to me that Lennart's personal goal is to make the perfect OS as he visualizes it. He's doing work to make it happen, and he's gaining support because the code is useful to other people. If people outside of Linux circles want to get involved in standardizing core DBUS interfaces (which they should, because pretty much everyone seems to use DBUS) and things like daemon startup notification, they should get involved with the systemd project and discuss the interfaces, not just tell people not to use them... That ship has already sailed. Systemd is rapidly becoming the de facto standard, and that progress is not suddenly going to stop because minorities complain too loudly. :)
You can be stuck in a maze, in a pit or under a tree trunk. You're legally free, since no law or copyright license is saying may not get out. Yet, you're stuck and if you can't get out, you're not free at all.
When it comes to software, it is the size, complexity and complicated interdependencies that make the maze. As the system grows, an individual's practical freedom erodes. For instance, I complain about the web a lot. Even with a browser's source code and a permissive free license, there's close to nothing I can change about it in practice. It would be far too much work for me to maintain millions of lines of code and remain compatible and interoperable with a huge, fast-changing stack of technology... and the more you diverge, the harder it becomes. It's an uphill battle, and at some point you have to give up if you're not the giant. So the four software freedoms are reduced to two (or less). In practice I don't have the freedom to do what I want.
I think the FSF's stance of reducing freedom to a merely ethical issue is alarming. How would Dr. Stallman have felt if he had gotten his printer driver with a free license but so much code and complexity and dependency that it would've been impossible for him and a small team of hackers to actually port it and make it run on his system?
Of course, systemd alone is not approaching that level of complexity. Except that it's not only systemd.. the trend seems to be that all aspects of a modern OS are getting larger and more complicated. A little here, a little there, it all adds up and becomes a lot, everywhere. It's a sad trend.
There was a time when you could've picked up a book that pretty much describes all of your system's hardware at a low enough level so that you could start writing your own bootloader and OS from scratch, with the knowledge that you can interface with all the logical hardware devices. And it didn't take hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Now the amount of accumulated cruft we depend on is so large that the idea of writing your own not-a-toy OS is laughable...
Standing on the shoulders of a giant is necessary and helpful, but when you have to do too much of it, it stifles innovation and encourages monocultures.
I don't have anything against systemd per se; it doesn't represent my ideals, doesn't bring me features I want, and so I don't want to use it. If Ubuntu and Debian want to use it, they're of course free to do so. However, I am concerned that with the notion that "systemd has won", its proponents are going to assume it to be everywhere and build future software with the attitude that it is okay to depend on it -- who cares about the people who would prefer not to use it, let them suffer for disagreeing with the king!
Before the systemd rage, sysvinit might have been "the winner" on Linux in the sense that it was most widely used and supported. But we didn't have this sort of polarizing "sysvinit has won, fuck everyone and everything else" notion. Other distros with other init systems have happily coexisted all along, and these other distros haven't had to constantly fight a growing dependency on one specific init system.
While I am not an expert on legal language and how it can be used by lawyers, I believe RMS and the FSF at least attempt to address this in the GPL Version 2 (there is probably a similar requirement in the GPL Version 3, but it is more complicated so I'm not sure which requirement corresponds to this quote form v2):
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
Code that is so large complex that it is not practical to understand or port wasn't written by a human. Such code is probably a template or macro expansion of the real source, and the "preferred form" would be the pre-expansion source.
This may not cover all ways of obfuscating the code, but "preferred form" is trying to be as inclusive as possible.
Or it was written by thousands of people over twenty years.
GPL doesn't protect you from accumulated cruft, complexity and snarly design that makes it hard to understand let alone modify a system.
Some hypervisor-based systems are moving in the opposite direction, with unikernels that reduce or eliminate the OS to run directly on virtual hardware: Cloudius OSv, HalVM, OpenMirage, Erlang on Xen.
It sounds to me like Gnome is the reason why you can't run Gnome without systemd, and that you should probably direct your complaints against them.
