Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 6, 2011 12:57 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Systemd and ConsoleKit by mjthayer
Parent article: Systemd and ConsoleKit

I would say that this is one of the reasons that free (as in free beer, but possibly by extension as in free speech) software will have a hard time reaching a high number of private desktops. Many people can't afford to depend on software for which the maintainers don't have some sort of obligation to them

When people decide to run Linux on their private desktop, they won't usually make that contingent on the fact that their Linux distributions run specific technology such as System V init and ConsoleKit. They're in it for the complete picture. When they install a distribution such as Debian or Fedora, they put their trust in the maintainers of that distribution to keep their systems running, not to maintain whatever selection of software packages they had originally installed, for eternity.

I don't think anyone who has made the move to Linux will consider going back to whatever they ran before simply because their Linux distribution is moving to a different type of user session switcher. If OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice were suddenly to disappear from view, that might be a problem for many users but for most of the basic infrastructure this is simply not the case because people don't tend to notice the individual software packages involved.

It is safe to say that most people will not care in the least whether their systems run System V init/ConsoleKit or systemd, as long as their systems run reliably and as long as, if they have started out with a setup based on System V init/ConsoleKit, the eventual transition to systemd happens in a way that does not lead to regressions or other noticeable problems.

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Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 6, 2011 13:10 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

>> I would say that this is one of the reasons that free (as in free beer, but possibly by extension as in free speech) software will have a hard time reaching a high number of private desktops. Many people can't afford to depend on software for which the maintainers don't have some sort of obligation to them

> When people decide to run Linux on their private desktop, they won't usually make that contingent on the fact that their Linux distributions run specific technology such as System V init and ConsoleKit. They're in it for the complete picture. When they install a distribution such as Debian or Fedora, they put their trust in the maintainers of that distribution to keep their systems running, not to maintain whatever selection of software packages they had originally installed, for eternity.

I will rephrase my point in this context then. They are trusting the distribution maintainers do act in their interests, but once again those maintainers have no sort of obligation to do so (yes, there is a reputation thing, but that is a very limited sort of obligation). So the maintainers will act as they see fit. For RedHat and friends, this means being answerable to enterprise customers, who have different needs to private desktop ones. In Debian there is, to my knowledge, a high overlap between maintainers and users (or at least the sort of person who uses Debian), but again, if you have different needs it may not be the right thing for you. Ubuntu looks to fulfil the needs of desktop users, sometimes in a slightly "we know what you need" sort of way, but still very well given their budget constraints. Unfortunately (I think) those constraints are too tight to make a sufficient impact in the direction of providing something really suitable to a majority of desktop users. I know there are other reasons, but I think this is still a major one.

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 6, 2011 13:45 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

They are trusting the distribution maintainers do act in their interests, but once again those maintainers have no sort of obligation to do so (yes, there is a reputation thing, but that is a very limited sort of obligation). So the maintainers will act as they see fit.

But the same applies to any operating system. For example, Microsoft's sole obligation is to keep the company profitable on behalf of its shareholders, which probably includes putting out versions of Windows etc. that are not so atrociously horrid that nobody will buy them (again, a »reputation thing«), but which most certainly does not include an obligation to keep every existing Windows machine in the world running forever. Within these constraints, Microsoft will act as they see fit.

People don't reasonably expect to buy a computer and then hang on to it for the rest of their own lives. So they only need to trust their vendors to keep the computer going during its useful life, which for most people these days is probably three to five years. In fact, many if not most people will not install a new major release of their machine's operating system vendors tend to find it difficult enough to make people install important security updates.

There are certainly Linux distributions around that will last for three to five years (on the same machine), and if »maintainer distrust« is indeed a major factor that keeps people from running Linux desktops, then we have a PR problem, not a technical or developer-social problem. After all, the nice thing about free software is that important stuff tends to stay around basically forever, and that one does not need to depend on a single vendor, whereas, in the world of proprietary software, if your vendor calls curtains on something you use that's it then.