Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Boycott Systemd

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 9:15 PM, Frank Peters <frank.peters@×××××××.net> wrote:
>
> FOSS developers have to maintain an awareness that there is no One True
> Way.  A computer has always been and always will be a general purpose machine.
> Therefore, the only rational philosophy for OS development is for an OS
> to empower the user to apply this generality for his own needs.
>

You're basically arguing that if somebody putting together an OS has a
working solution for something, they should spend just as much effort
maintaining 3 other solutions for that something, and ensure that none
of the solutions becomes any better than the others.  OpenRC and
Portage should work just as well with only csh installed as it does
with bash installed, etc.

That just isn't realistic.  Most distros would rather support 47
features that users want, and not 3 features implemented 5 different
ways each in a manner that is completely interchangeable.  If a distro
did things the way you wanted, very few would bother to use it, and
likely fewer would bother to maintain it.

You'll always have alternative solutions in FOSS because volunteers
will work on things that interest them.  Even after 99% of everything
supports systemd exclusively you'll still find people writing sysvinit
implementations from scratch in Ruby, just for the fun of it.
However, you'll never find those alternative solutions receiving
mainstream support, unless one actually tips the scale to the point
where it is considered an equal.  Heck, look at postgres - most would
say that it is superior to mysql in many ways and yet many packages
still don't support it.

Nothing is preventing you from starting a "Foundation for Redundant
Solutions" - with the express aim of maintaining all the stuff nobody
uses any longer.  I can't imagine you'll get a lot of donations - even
if people might agree with you philosophically at some level, they're
going to want to spend their money investing in stuff they actually
use.

--
Rich