Systemd 252

>where to me, running Linux is about choice.

Quote :

"From: Adam Jackson To: Development discussions related to Fedora Subject: Linux is not about choice [was Re: Fedora too cutting edge?] Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:58:45 -0500

> Linux is about choice.

If I could only have one thing this year, it would be to eliminate that meme from the collective consciousness. It is a disease. It strangles the mind and ensures you can never change anything ever because someone somewhere has OCD'd their environment exactly how they like it and how dare you change it on them you're so mean and next time I have friends over for Buffy night you're not invited mom he's sitting on my side again.

As a consumer, yes, you have lots of choices in which Linux you use. This does not mean Linux is in any sense _about_ choice, any more than because there are so many kinds of cars you can buy that cars are about choice.

The complaints up-thread about juju and pulse are entirely valid, but the solution is not to try to deliver two things at once. If you try to deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between the two. Now you have three moving parts instead of one, which means the failure rate has gone up by a factor of _six_ (three parts, and three interactions). We have essentially already posited that we have insufficient developer effort to have 100%-complete features at ship time, so asking them to take on six times the failure rate when they're already overburdened is just madness. Alternatively, we could say that we're integrating features too rapidly, but you do that at the expense of goal 1, to be the showcase for the latest and greatest in free software.

Software is hard. The way to fix it is to fix it, not sweep it under the rug.

There is a legitimate discussion to be had about where and how we draw the line for feature inclusion, about how we increase and formalize our testing efforts, and about how we develop and deploy spike solutions for corner-case problems like the one device class that juju happens to do worse than the old stack. But the chain of logic from "Linux is about choice" to "ship everything and let the user chose how they want their sound to not work" starts with fallacy and ends with disaster.

- ajax "

Seems like a pointless complain to me. It’s arguing for the sake of it.

Human systems tend to flourish when political and economic decision-making is relatively distributed throughout a given population. I believe this position is backed by a reasonable amount of empirical observation.

Machines are (as of this writing) programmed by humans. Unlike humans, machines are automated rule-followers. This is substantively different from decision-making, which is a uniquely human trait involving moral agency, free will, etc. (at least as I'm defining it for the purposes of my argument). If you try to turn humans into automated rule-followers by decree, they tend to become miserable. Fortunately, one does not have to take into account how machines feel about being absolved of all decision-making, making such control systems very effective (you don't have to kill / imprison the dissenters). But even though the machines might be more effectively programmed by a centralized, unified, top-down, "authoritarian" control architecture, you still need humans to build this controller. And since we know software projects end up mirroring the communication structure of the humans in charge of building them, it follows that authoritarian-minded software engineers would be a best fit for building such systems.

The converse is that libertarian-minded software engineers tend to recoil in horror when they encounter authoritarian software design, no matter how unified, elegant, or effective it may be. Such things are a moral transgression to the libertarian.