Or worse: they simply bypass you:

A: We need your widget X to be modified to produce wingnut Y by March.

B: I can't commit to that now; I need to work up the design and give you a good estimate.

A: Never mind. We'll go with Team C and their widget Z - they assure us they can have it done well before March (the implication being they are more responsive/better than us - never mind that the new widget isn't integrated with our network or systems - and they are going to need us to do the integration work anyway because they know nothing about the systems etc..)

At this point the PMs and Program Managers break into song:

They should probably start off by reading the Agile Manifesto...where it talks about the values of agile development - one of which is to value Working software over comprehensive documentation. Sounds like they have the wrong focus.

Mediocrity is not uncommon, and there are way too many people in the development end of things that shouldn't be. I've been dealing with these clowns for almost 20 years now - and this very topic is what is driving me to retire early and do something else with my time, instead of the endless death marches to nowhere.

Then it will be time to fork Linus...

J/K

However, maybe someone should give the Linux POSIX APIs some loving - and implement a new improved non-systemd distro, and add good support for features/apps that were lost in the 'Great Systemd Landrush of 2014' (basically fork projects that decide only to support systemd - if they are something we gotta have on BSD and Linux).

The one thing I think we can depend upon is the Linux Kernel itself...everything else is questionable given limited resources; if you care about having a given feature that is threatened - put your money/sweat where your mouth is - and support it.

I would like to know what kind of administration you are doing through a 'flash web gui'? Isn't command line sufficient for admin work? Or am I missing the point in some (not so) subtle way?

Interestingly enough, as I wrote the above, the flash player in Chrome decided to die...heh.

Devolve? I'm still waiting for them to evolve into citizens.

Who is going to pay for all of that fiber - and associated changes to the network to allow it to go the last mile (so far, the only fiber we've seen to the home is in very small enclaves of people who can afford premium services anyway)?

If you believe that should reside in the corporate realm, then how do you as a corporation turn a profit while also investing in a universal fiber network?

If you believe it should be in the government realm - how do you get politicians to support fund allocations for it - and who does the money go to (municipalities, the aforementioned corporations, someone else)?

Until some key functionality used by people is no longer available in that distro due to decisions made upstream to no longer support the code base, or other dependencies.

If I use KDE - which I do - then packages for that become unavailable at some point in Slackware given the above. That means I will be forced to use systemd if I want to continue using KDE; which also means I will have to change distributions, assuming Slackware remains systemd free, as well.

Not trivial. Not easy. Not freedom of choice.

It simply solve a lot of real world problems and makes life easier for both upstream developers, distro makers and end users.

That is simply a lie.

There; fixed that for you. Your statement made a very big assumption - not borne out by statements I've read here by system admins.

It's like being told that if you use bash, you must use emacs.

I thought that was a given?

While, in principle I agree with you (I learned at a university that had several MIT PHDs in the computer science department - one of which was the head of the department - and later in my career when interviewing new candidates, and working with people from what I will call 'sub standard' programs - I saw first hand that all CS degrees were not equal) - I also realize that the people coming from the top university are going to gravitate to where the money is - meaning if you are a small company, or in a company that can't attract the top talent you will be stuck with what you can get.

This situation isn't bound to change, so how do we deal with this? I think the solution should be multifold and systematic to have possibility of success:

1. Every programmer shouldn't have to be a system developer; partition your developers into two camps: a very small group of system developers (for OS, building development tools, and embedded work as needed), and a very large group of what I will call 'application' developers (for applications end users will touch).

2. Limit the tools your Application Developers have available to them. They shouldn't be able to shoot themselves, or their users, in the foot.

3. Focus your System Developers on building tools and libraries for selected application class languages that do not allow Application Developers to reinvent the wheel for things that they shouldn't be - such as memory management and security (the aforementioned 'loaded guns'). Enforce standards for access to and use of the tools by the Application Developer group.

4. To avoid having developers working on software that will only benefit one user - provide safe tools to allow end users to build their own simple applications (e.g. Hypercard - or other paradigms that are appropriate, above and beyond spreadsheets and word processing software). Once an application created in this way becomes popular enough - you have to option of translating it through your application developer team...or leave it as is. If you were smart when you built your (hypercard-like) tool - you allowed it be integrated with, or translated to other systems in safe ways - so that it can be shared with minimal impact/workload.

If we don't find a way to something like what I describe, we will continue to suffer as we keep expecting all CS graduates/programmers to be equal. HR and Execs don't like this because they want all developers to be interchangeable widgets...but reality does not bend to policy.

I had the pleasure of access to and use of an Amiga 1000 in '86. It hosted many of my firsts in computing:

First use of a graphical interface

First use of virtualization (hosted an IBM DOS virtual environment in a window - used for running and building DOS applications for IBM PC - the Amiga OS was perfect for this - since it virtualized it's own components as well)

First filled polygon video game (3D up to that point was wireframe)

First real multimedia PC used

First use of a PC with a multitasking operating system

First use of full featured embedded scripting capabilities in an operating system (MS DOS batch processing doesn't count)

After using the Amiga, nothing that followed really surprised me - but most commercial solutions I found limiting in one way or another (e.g. Windows 3.1 lack of preemptive multitasking).

In '95 was looking at OS2 Warp as a better alternative to Windows '95 [I wanted something that had tools I could quickly be productive with; I spent many hours with the Win32 API bible with little to show for it - and J++ just was a fail from an interoperability standpoint] - when I was introduced to Linux - which had what was missing, and dovetailed nicely with my studies at the university - (the computer science lab was well equipped with Sun Solaris machines - and we did all of our development coursework on Unix as a result - and when I got Slackware 2.3 up and running - I started dialing in my projects from home - my first exposure to telecommuting).

The biggest lesson I took from my experience with the Amiga is that being productive with a computer should be easy - and if it isn't then you should look somewhere else until you find it. It may seem counterintuitive given that I ended up with one of the most difficult distros to install at the time. Having a built-in tool set in the form of command line scripting, and other extension languages, in addition to the core system programming languages was key to my own efficiency in getting things done. That being said - today, even for someone who knows how to program, finding easier/quicker ways to get work done is valuable. Everyone is not a computer scientist - and shouldn't have to be to make working tools for themselves easily. While projects have addressed subsets in this arena (spreadsheets, wordprocessing etc), no one has address the fundamental problem of creating a malleable tool for general purpose use - that I am aware of.

IT departments in large companies, and the shrink-wrapped software companies do a good job of accomplishing large projects and particular popular niches (standard office suites) - but they are horrible when addressing the unique needs of the individual. That's where something like hypercard would find a home.

The only good thing I can see about systemd is the exposure of some Linux system APIs that were not exposed via the POSIX subsystem. Nice - but not required by most of us - and could be added to existing standards based initialization daemons without totally rewriting the rules.

Otherwise it seems to be more likely a thinly veiled (actually not veiled at all...given comments of the principles) attempt to fragment the POSIX world - and forcing projects with limited resources to make a Hobson's choice of whether to support systemd based Linux or POSIX standards exclusively. It breaks write once - compile/run anywhere - that was generally available for those who made sure their applications were POSIX compliant. This means that a lot of software that was available across Linux, and Unix flavors (BSD) will now be exclusively available on one or the other - thus fragmenting the *nix world.

Software is not separate from the ethics that surrounds it. This approach and apparent rabid anti-interoperability view is arrogant and self-serving at the expense of cooperation and choice. Furthermore, the monolithic architecture, obfuscated binary logs, and centralized configuration are antithetical to the Unix way - and makes a linux system as difficult to deal with as a Windows system from an automation and management perspective, and raises concerns in terms of security (the greater the complexity in a system, the greater the opportunity for bugs - and thus the greater the attack surface).

Finally it throws away many many years of experience/knowledge acquired by system admins, developers, and users about how a *nix system operates and is configured. This fragmentation of the human factors aspect will by its very nature cause faults/issues during operation.

So - for a host of reasons, I believe it is technically - and more importantly - ethically wrong.

There is actually one more good thing I can think of: it will spawn new distros, software projects to provide alternatives of various applications in the stack, and perhaps new operating systems altogether - with a renewed focus on design simplicity (KISS) and all of the benefits that come from that. Once a system becomes too complex to understand - are you sure you can trust it? So to recap: systemd has two things going for it; exposure of Linux APIs, and the power to breath life into the further exploration of alternatives in the OS/application layer.

Is there a compile switch for that, or do I need to write a script? UninstallPoettering.sh