I would say that he misunderstands the essence, the substance and possibly even the purpose of the UNIX philosophy... but I think he actually does understand. I think he's simply being disingenuous, twisting the definition to meet his desires. It's clear that this is a man who believes that he knows what's good and what's not.

This blog post from last September lays out in perfect clarity how dismissive he is of contrary points of view:

The toolbox approach of classic Linux distributions is fantastic for people who want to put together their individual system, nicely adjusted to exactly what they need. However, this is not really how many of today's Linux systems are built, installed or updated. If you build any kind of embedded device, a server system, or even user systems, you frequently do your work based on complete system images, that are linearly versioned. You build these images somewhere, and then you replicate them atomically to a larger number of systems. On these systems, you don't install or remove packages, you get a defined set of files, and besides installing or updating the system there are no ways how to change the set of tools you get.

[Emphasis mine]

So the toolkit approach is not useful for someone who's deploying large numbers of commodity servers? This defies logic. It implies that somehow it's better to use commodity servers built using Lennart's toolkit than to have the capability to define one's own toolkit to build your own purpose-built standard image.

He's ignoring logic here in order to serve his own agenda, which of course consists of being smarter and sleeker and better than some crufty old Linux with 20 years of barnacles on its hull.

Init on Linux emphatically is ugly, but it's the product of a very large number of people coping with a very large set of circumstances, and finding a solution that is decidedly imperfect, but can be made to address most of the hundreds of thousands of peculiar and unique use cases in the world today.

Quoth Poettering:

The Linux model is the one where you have everything split up, and have different maintainers, different coding styles, different release cycles, different maintenance statuses. Much of the Linux userspace used to be pretty badly maintained, if at all. You had completely different styles, the commands worked differently – in the most superficial level, some used -h for help, and others ––help. It’s not uniform.

This really is the essence of it. When you get right down to it, he's just pissed at having to deal with other people's half-assed implementations of everything, and having to make all the bits work to a purpose. It's just too... democratic. I suspect he feels the same way George W. Bush did when he famously quipped that if he really were a dictator, he'd get a lot more done.

And that's really the essence of the problem. No matter how good systemd turns out to be, it's effectively less than a dozen core committers (the top 10 committers have submitted over 90% of the code) dictating how your modular system is going to run. They want a single group (themselves) and a single philosophy (theirs) to occupy pretty much the entire space between the kernel and userland. And that is not the Linux way of doing things.

"PC ROAD RETTER? What dis fuckin' PC ROAD RETTER? You die today, Minister!"

I think you've forgotten —or never knew— the carriage release. It was a feature on both my old Remington manual and my Underwood electric that allowed the carriage to slide all the way to the end with a single gesture. And depending on how you set your tabstops, you could probably get the same effect with the TAB key, too.

See above.

Are you implying that there was a time when residential internet was regulated under Title II? If so, I'd be interested to hear a great deal more.

And was that due specifically to Title II, or was it due to other regulation, which allowed the national, monolithic monopoly that Lily Tomlin (quite rightly) so loved to hate?

I stand to be corrected, but I believe that there's nothing currently in Title II that would result in the stagnation that AT&T brought about in its time. It's true that there would be greater scrutiny of how carriers manage their networks, which could conceivably result in slow-downs in deployment of certain management practices and technologies, but I'd venture to suggest that that's the fucking point.

When 'innovation' means a willingness to hold a content service's customers to ransom, then hell yes, I'd like to see that process slowed down. I'd even pay a little for the privilege of not getting fucked over.

I agree that it's unfortunate that such measures seem to be necessary. It would be nice to believe that the invisible hand would bitch slap any company that tried to play fast and loose with its customers. But tragically, because of the nature of communications networks, that doesn't always happen.

And let's make no mistake - it's the very companies who are guilty of these sins that are arguing that Title II is a return to the 'bad old days' of the 1930s, when the FCC was created and Title II came into being. It was during those 'bad old days', by the way, that the majority of Americans finally got telephone service, such as it was.

Well, purportedly, the reason for this is to ensure profits, but that doesn't compute. Even a business undergrad could tell you that with a little rationalisation in the business space, it would be possible for Hollywood to extend their control and improve their profits in the process. Somehow, though, the ridiculously hidebound distribution chain is successfully working against an improved industry. There are enough people with a vested interest in keeping things the way they were (the way things are is... obviously different) that they can cut off their proverbial face to spite their nose. Yes it's that illogical.

I'm really surprised that, even with over a decade to adjust, most media companies have yet to do so. Even telcos, the other digital industry we love to hate, have learned significant lessons and are in the process of taming a frontier they initially ignored. But media - their collective consciousness defies even a modicum of logic.

You might like to look up the difference between coercion and deception. One of them is almost always a crime; the other, not so much.

Why yes, I am a liberal arts major, who studied classical logic, among other things. I was responding to the assertion that 'most' liberal arts majors ended up as lowly restaurant workers. I countered that by asserting a) that restaurant workers are not so lowly as characterised; b) that drawing general conclusions about people's prospects based on their education does not bear out, particularly where some of the more respected and influential jobs are concerned; and c) that in a number of cases, a liberal arts education is a precursor to the kind of work that most people can only dream about.

You see, I was actually not making a positive argument so much as rebutting (and refuting) someone else's crass, inaccurate and unsubstantiated assertion that a liberal arts degree is valueless. Shocking, isn't it, to see a STEM major failing so badly at applying basic logic?

But yeah, the plural of anecdote is not always data.

P.S. For the humour-impaired: I'm a keyboard monkey, too. A liberal arts educated keyboard monkey.

Two things:

First - I supported myself for a decade working in bars and restaurants. There are more interesting people living interesting lives employed in that sector than just about any other.

Second - Ridley Scott went to art college. Peter Jackson was self-taught. James Cameron was a truck driver. The people who have done more to shape your vision than you're likely able to realise followed no discernible pattern of behaviour. I'd advise you to save your derision until someone's earned it.

Case in point: One 'liberal arts' friend of mine plays the king of the White Walkers on GoT. Another works on The Daily Show. How's your job look now, keyboard monkey?

Did a double major in Theatre and English Literature. After 20 years of gainful employment in systems software development and consulting, I'm now CTO at an international think tank. I also know the value of capitalisation and punctuation.

Short version: It's horses for courses; reflect carefully, then do what you feel is best. If you're smart, the real determining factor is how hard you're willing to work, and how well you continue to learn.

No dispute there. The problem, though, is not that we make easy things simple and hard things possible (pace, Larry Wall). It's that we have of late developed a tendency to simplify too far. Microsoft is famous for making systems administration and certain types of programming 'click-and-drool' easy. And hyperbole aside, the cost to society of the half-competent people who found gainful employment due to this charade can be measured in the many billions.

You're absolutely right in that commercial flying is safer than ever, notwithstanding the tendency in airlines to pressure senior pilots out in favour of cheaper, younger staff. And those working in HFT would likely be wreaking havoc by other means if they didn't have software and fibre-optics to enable them. I guess my tongue hadn't entirely left my cheek when I wrote that last para.

BUT... Microsoft has contributed significantly to a general downward trend in the quality of software and systems integrity. And they've done so by marketing the idea that with the right tools, tool users can be commoditised. And that really, really sucks.

Agreed. 'Software that makes it easy for non-experts to do expert tasks' will one day be recognised for its role in causing the downfall of civilisation as we know it. By then, of course, it will be too late.

Some among you may think that's overstating things. Some among you are also .NET developers, so what do you know?

Seriously, though: From the Airbus crash to high frequency trading to the Sony hack, examples abound of how enabling and empowering mediocrity is the first ingredient of every modern tragedy.

This post, not least because of the sig, wins the internet today. It's why I persist in reading Slashdot. Even as this site declines, it still has moments like this when someone posts something intellectually challenging, scientifically insightful and sardonically clever as fuck.

Actually, I wish he had limited the statement to the persistence of known bugs in FOSS code bases. ESR said the bugs are easier to find as the number of beta testers and developers increases. This doesn't appear to be true. One thing that is true is that code quality is viewed differently in FOSS than in commercial, proprietary software. All too often, software businesses treat QA, debugging and code maintenance as overhead, so there's a perverse incentive to leave known bugs - even the most egregious ones - lying around indefinitely - or at least until someone publicly raises a stink. FOSS culture values code quality more highly and is less tolerant toward bugs, so generally speaking we see somewhat better code quality, and somewhat shorter known bug life than in similar proprietary projects.

Emphasis on 'generally speaking' in the above. Exceptions abound, but I think the trend is clear.

If there were a just and caring God, he would never let geeks name things.

POODLE?

Jesus wept. Literally. He heard the name and wept tears.

Geeks made baby Jesus cry.

Er, no.

The 'why' has little to do with IP law and a lot to do with group dynamics, especially herd behaviour. Take this statement, for example:

One of my personal pet causes is developing a better alternative to HTML/CSS. This is a case where the metaphorical snowdrift is R&D on new platforms (which could at least initially compile to HTML/CSS).

The problem with the 'snowdrift' here, to abuse the metaphor, has nothing to do with IP law, and nothing to do with lack of innovation. It has everything to do with the size of the drift. You don't have any choice but to wait for someone else to come along to help shovel. But the author is trying to say, If everyone doesn't shovel, nobody gets out. And that's not always true.

A quick reminder: When HTML first came out, the very first thing virtually every proprietary software vendor of note did was publish their own website design tool. And each of those tools used proprietary extensions and/or unique behaviour in an attempt to corner the market on web development, and therefore on the web itself.

But the 'snowdrift' in this case was all the other companies. Because no single one of them was capable of establishing and holding overwhelming dominance, the 'drift' was doomed to remain more manageable by groups than by any single entity. (Microsoft came closest to achieving dominance, but ultimately their failure was such that they have in fact been weakened by the effort.)

Say what you like about the W3C, and draw what conclusions you will from the recent schism-and-reunification with WHATWG. The plain fact is that stodgy, not-too-volatile standards actually work in everybody's favour. To be clear: they provide the greatest benefit to the group, not to the enfant terrible programmer who thinks he knows better than multiple generations of his predecessors.

Yes, FOSS projects face institutional weaknesses, including a lack of funding. Especially on funding for R&D. But funded projects face significant weaknesses as well. Just look at the Node.JS / io.js fork, all because Joyent went overboard in its egalitarian zeal. Consider also that recent widely publicised bugs, despite the alarm they've caused, haven't really done much to affect the relative level of quality in funded vs proprietary vs unfunded code bases. They all have gaping holes, but the extent of their suckage seems to be dependent on factors other than funding. If not, Microsoft would be the ne plus ultra of software.

Weighed in the balance, therefore, FOSS's existential problems are real, and significant, but they're not as significant as those faced by all the other methods we've tried. So to those who have a better idea about how to balance community benefits and obligations, I can only reply as the Empress famously did when revolutionaries carried her bodily from the palace: 'I wish them well.'