> On the one hand, forking is what drives Free Software. It allows us to innovate,
> adapt software to new needs, etc. Without it, the FOSS community would not be
> as strong as it is.

Of course the ability of forking is great. I would compare it to a relationship - if at some point you realize that your goals or whatever are not in sync then you fork it is not easy comes with attached looses to both sides but it is but doable. And an obvious way to go if you can't go together.

BUT this is not a fork in my opinion. A fork it will be if we can get anything usable from it like a working distro in this case. But now it is just an other act of DRAMA. Like in relationship - you know I am forking right now! look this is my fork website! look i WILL fork. Geeesh than do fork and get over it.

These guys are behaving like overly attached boy/girl friend who in fact DOES NOT want to fork but uses threats that she/he will fork to force something on the other side.

I know it is simplification but really right now from my point of view it just looks like emotional drama.

As for techical merits in my own opinion. I dont care. I am not by any means a white bearded system admin. I use Linux profesionally and I like it. I really haven't noticed the whole systemd drama until it popped out in media. Professinaly I use RHEL and CentOS because I can run software on it for my employer and it is OK. We use Oracle, SAP, Zimbra and other products so for me it makes no real difference as what init system is used as far as it works.

In my personal systems I've used RH from like 5.0 release and I liked it. I used it till it separated into RHEL and Fedora - then I've used Fedora but around release 14 or some it becamed very annoying (lots of problems with distro upgrade, hardware etc.). Then I've started to evaluate other distros. Also got a RaspberryPi and tried Pidora on that. More annoyng than ever. Then I've tried Arch Linux and I got hooked imediately - works well on my home systems (server, workstation, laptop) and also on RaspberryPi. And it uses systemd in more fashinable way than Fedora (but things may have gone better - I've not touched it since 14). So I don't really get this systemd "controversy".

First of all - thanks for an interesting comment. Your insight on licensing issues regarding use of systemd never occured to me.

Regarding your comment - I cant validate all your claims right now but I trust they are valid - in Your opinion why there is NO mention about licensing on the new fork site? The site is TL;DR to me as it is in my opinion yet another meaningless fork of Debian but I tried to search the site for terms like "license", "gpl" and there are exactly zero occurances of such terms. It seems to me as the authors of the fork didn't find your arguments about licensing as interesting to mention it.

So how exactly this fork is better for your goals?

If I was in situation in which licensing was critical to me I would use Gentoo since as far as I know it is only decent and recent distro that actually lets you choose init system to your liking.

I expect a self driving car to be many many times better at lining itself up with a trailer hitch than a human driver. For instance it probably has exact detailed knowledge of the position of the hitch down to a millimeter. Don't know what in the world makes you think this is a harder problem than normal driving.

It was designed to go to a nearer comet. Due to booster failures they missed the launch window. Several risky maneuvers (such as hibernation) were added to the mission to reuse this hardware.

The coatings on the glass are not symmetric. However I guess you could clean it and flip it back. Another problem is that people like to use the area near the windows of their office and put furniture there.

Mozilla is loosing it. Fx gets more and more irrelevant between various UI changes and more bloat added. Usage is declining. And yet they try to reinvent themselves with such ideas. What for? Just make a decent browser and build developer tools into it like everybody else does. What is the point of such product? To have yet another browser/platform to build and test for?

That chart is very misleading. It says solar will use many times as much silver as current energy production. However the drawing makes it look like it will use many times as much silver as it would use of aluminum. Actually it will use far more aluminum than silver. Same error applies to every comparison of different materials, whether inside a given energy source or between them.

The text gets it right: "Solar needs much more silver and tin than other energy sources, albeit relatively little by weight". It also states "solar uses aluminum, and a lot of it, more than one gram for each kilowatt hour". Aluminum is a bigger problem for solar than silver, despite the incredibly misleading graphic.

Another strange mistake is that the relative use of stuff is biased by the current fraction being used. An obvious one is that it shows Nuclear power as using about 8x as much uranium as "the current power mix". But that is because the current power mix is about 20% nuclear! If "the current power mix" was 0% nuclear then the uranium circle would be HUGE.

A better graphic would be to show absolute sizes of the materials (to produce a given amount of energy), or perhaps multiply the sizes by the amount of carbon produced to make them.

Tidal flow is not sinusoidal.

It's always fun to see rabid extreme and nonsensical left-wing opinions here. Provides some balance to the right-wing trolls. Thank you.

I believe you are correct.

I think the reason no store charges a credit card more than the cash price is because it will reduce sales. If you go to the store and see an object for $100 you might say "I don't have $100 cash on me right now, and if I use the credit card it will cost $105. So I will go away and come back tomorrow with $100 in cash." Then what happens is you either forget about it, purchase somewhere else, or realize you probably did not need the object anyway. The store has now lost an entire sale, which is a much bigger loss than paying the credit card companies cut.

People looking to buy gas probably will factor in the fact that they may run out of gas before they can acquire the cash, and thus will buy the gas anyway.

I think some other items like utilities where you pretty much have to buy from them will also offer discounts for cash.

He was talking about the CENSUS, not press freedom, you idiot.

And I think there were more advanced weapons than flintlocks in 1968.

The best scientific minds, in their times said the world was flat and that everything revolved around the earth.

Sorry you are wrong. The earth was known to be a sphere long long ago. It way predates the knowledge that the center of mass of the system was not inside it.

Showing your complete ignorance of history and science does not help your argument one bit.

"ls" on Unix used to do that (alphabetize across columns). I think it was fixed mid-80's.

> For me, Linux is about control.

And exactly what aspect of control is taken from you by systemd?

> Apparently, systemd replaces all that and more with a single monolithic
> structure, which seems more akin to the Windows way of doing things.

No it isn't. Lots of commercial unix like operating systems had moved on to some form of init system not based on shell scripts f.e. Solaris, Mac OS X etc.

> It's main selling point appears to be boot-up speed

No it isn't.

> IMO the cost that we must all pay for that extra speed is just too high

And what is the cost exactly? What exactly do you have against systemd? Only thing you stated is that it is monolithic and non unix way. I don't rally care about it. What practical limitation does it cause? Only valid complains about systemd I've read so far is that is not standard as it is an implementation and in theory this shouldn't be done like that. And I agree but still it exist, it works and it is not going anywhere. The second complaint is that it uses binary log file. It does in fact but I also don't care about that. I can config it to forward to syslog so it is no problem. Actually by using such architecture it can start logging earlier than sysvinit system which is better. These two flaws do exist but they do not rule against systemd in general. It is still a step forward in right dimension.

Look at CoreOS and its components like fleet - this is what systemd was designed for and it is strictly server operating system.

> The init process is a critical stage: failure tends to leave you with no access to
> the system to diagnose the failure.

Nowdays not really a problem. If this is a desktop system then just hook up a LiveCD with your choosen distro or an USB stick and go on from the live system. With live system images you have all the tools you need and as far as the system's storageis not damaged you can do whatever you wish. As for servers - well remote lights out, management cards, flash addons, consoles etc. you can do whatever to rescue the system. Or if you cant afford it just use serial console to the bootloader and add a failsafe recovery system partition with an image containing all the needed tools and you are ready to go. Mind that these means were used like long time ago even before systemd happened. ;) If you are thinking about disaster then get ready for it when your systems work.

> Shell scripts and plaintext log files may be primitive, but they have the advantage of being easy
> to read with minimal access and not requiring complex stuff to run

Look above - complex stuff to run is not as complex as you see it. You can easly run even an graphical desktop system to recover your system even if you wish for doing so (most live cds do so). You just need to plan it ahead.

> mainly they just require that basic binaries be available in the path

Systemd does not depend on these tiny binaries. In my opinion it is an advantage. It still needs to get unit information from somewhere (like local filesystem or fleet).

> Until I've got at least a basic system up and running enough to log in and work

This is probably the old or wrong way of doing stuff. Just boot from something else and chroot to the system and then check the problem.

> text-based tools will probably run to decipher binary logfiles

You reall don't need to decipher anything as the log files are not ciphered. You just need to open them with specialised tool (avaiable on your rescue media from which you have booted). You don't quite get why people have problem with binary log files do you? The problem is not about tools for accessing them - the main problem is if they get corrupt they are much harder to recover than plain text files.

> and modify configurations

With systemd you do not need any special binary tool to modify configuration.

> The only change I'd make is to make systemd use syslogd like everything else

But it does.

> SysV init scripts may be clunky and primitive, but they've been around a long time.

So?

> People know how to manage them, and they've had the kinks worked out of them and
> best practices established. systemd doesn't have that.

It does. But I get what you're getting at - writing a startup script yourself. So maybe try writing systemd unit for your need yourself and then compare it to sysv. IMVHO systemd units are easier (as more simple) to write than shell scipts for sysvinit. But YMMV.