Re: [gentoo-user] from Firefox52: NO pure ALSA?, WAS: Firefox 49.0 & Youtube... Audio: No

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello Rich, and Gentoo.

As a reference point, just before I start, I'm a contributor to Emacs,
both new stuff and bug fixing, in both C and Lisp, and (occasionally) I
write documentation.  ;-)

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:57:02PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@××××××××××××.de> wrote:
> > Am 20.12.2016 um 17:47 schrieb Rich Freeman:
> >> Clearly nobody forced you to run it, because you aren't running it
> >> now.

> > That's again one of those silly arguments. I'm just not running it
> > because I'm using Gentoo again. On Arch Linux they forced systemd onto
> > the users. Because the Arch Linux users don't have any choice if they
> > want to use Arch Linux, because they e.g. don't want to compile anything
> > and still want to have bleeding edge software.

> Anybody can run openrc on Arch linux.  They just have to set it up
> themselves, or form a group to share the work.

There's no "just" to it.  It would be a long, time consuming project;
unless, of course you were already intimately familiar with both openrc
and Arch Linux.

I too get annoyed by the attitude "it's free software, _just_ change it
to do what you want/fork it.".  The software is indeed in one sense free,
in another sense it's tightly controlled by its maintainers.  Anybody
capable enough, with enough time on their hands can indeed change it, but
only for themselves - if the maintainers don't like your patch, then it's
going nowhere but your own box.  Unless, of course, you've got a really
massive amount of time on your hands, a group of like-minded hackers,
organisational ability, and the drive required to fork a project.

[ .... ]

> >> People who prefer systemd will maintain it, and people who prefer
> >> openrc will maintain that, and we can all be happy.

But for how long?  systemd is primarily a political project, not a
technical one.  Its object is clearly to turn GNU/Linux into a tightly
bound vertical stack where only Red Hat's views on what is good will
prevail.  Our freedom to chose which core packages to run is being
steadily encroached upon, and pretty soon we will have no choice at all.

Already, as discussed in this thread, pulseaudio has become a hard
dependency of Firefox on G/L, and pulseaudio is controlled by the
politicians.  The next step will be to make systemd a hard dependency of
pulseaudio (it will happen, just as it happened for udev and gnome), at
which point the "happy" people running openrc will not be able to run
Firefox.  Happy indeed.

Sadly, there are not enough people in the free software world who were
politically aware enough, and energetic enough, to fight this purloining
of our software by Red Hat.  It should surely have been obvious enough
when they made the technically loopy decision to subsume udev into
systemd, that the idea was to capture the core software.  The process is
largely complete - we have lost.  People not running systemd and friends
are gradually being pushed into irrelevant backwaters.

> > That's true for Gentoo, Slackware, Devuan, and maybe still Debian, but
> > not for the other Distros like Ubuntu and its derivatives, Arch Linux,
> > Redhat, Fedora etc.


> Anybody can maintain openrc on any distro.

No they can't.  Or at least, not unless they make it their main spare
time occupation, and already are competent hackers.

> Maybe they can't put it in the official repository, that would be up to
> the people who control those repositories.  However, as everybody is
> quick to point out the dependency list for sysvinit+openrc is
> incredibly light, which makes it fairly easy to run on any distro.  You
> could probably get sysvinit running on arch in 15min.

Sorry, but that's so far out of kilter with reality I have to object.  If
you are intimately familiar with openrc, the Linux booting system,
administrative things (like where to find the source code), technical
things (how to build it, how to link it into Linux), you just _might_
manage it in a few hours.  Somebody starting from scratch is not going to
get sysvinit running on a different distro in 15 hours, never mind 15
minutes.

Hacking free software is a slow laborious process.

> Openrc would take longer, mainly because you'd have to adapt the
> scripts for any services you care about.  But, it isn't THAT hard to
> do.

There's a lot of learning involved first.

I thoroughly dislike all these platitudes that have also annoyed Heiko.
That "you get what you pay for", "It's free, get up and hack", and so on.
There are (or, at least, used to be) unwritten understandings between
hackers, like: you don't make other hackers' lives difficult; you support
other hackers' freedom to hack; you _MAINTAIN_ your own products; even
you have a responsibility to the community to maintain your software.  It
is these understandings that allowed free software to flourish.
Predatory companies like Red Hat (there are probably others) have broken
these understandings, and twisted others' helpfulness and naivety to
their own perverted ends.

I don't like the way things are going.  Good night!

> --
> Rich

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).