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Linux Foundation Chief: Businesses 'Will Fail' If They Don't Use Open Source Code (techrepublic.com)
The luminaries speaking at the Google Cloud Next conference had some strong words about the importance of openness, innovation, and a rich developer community. An anonymous reader writes:
First Vint Cert said there's a "thread of openness" that runs throughout the internet, adding that "the internet, itself, has open characteristics" and thrives on "permissionless innovation." And Eric Brewer, vice president of infrastructure at Google, touched on the same themes, according to Tech Republic. "Linux, Brewer said, won some of the early internet wars because it was open, but also because it was the most innovative of its time. He also said that companies should work with open source for the value of the ecosystem and community, not just the value of the code." Then Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told the audience that business models were already changing to include open source, and ultimately made the argument that organizations that "don't harvest the shared innovation" of open source "will fail."
After seeing how GNOME 3, systemd and PulseAudio have destroyed Linux's usability for me, and after seeing how Firefox has gone way down hill, I have to question the involvement of large organizations, profit-driven or not, when it comes to the development of open source software.
The best open source software I use on a daily basis is developed by a single individual, or perhaps a small team at most. This software is usable and pleasant to use, perhaps because the creators are often among its heaviest users.
The worst open source software I have had to use has been developed by corporations or large organizations. In some cases this software has been supremely disruptive, especially when it has been forced on unwilling victims, like in the case of systemd. It's really strange to talk about the "ecosystem and the community", when software like systemd has, in my opinion and experience, inflicted great pain upon both of those things.
Do they use linux? If not I dont see them failing (or failing to get bailed out) anytime soon.
Those things Google mentions-- like "Permissionless innovation" and the like-- those frighten the shit out of businesses who revolve around gatekeeping.
You see, to stay relevant in such an atmosphere, one has to actually be innovative, stay innovative, and be among the most innovative. That costs money and effort. Innovating early, then stagnating the market with gatekeeping and patent abuse allows them to reap big financial rewards for years while doing nothing but placating shareholders. (See, EG, the likes of Oracle.)
Google is *really* telling them that their market abuse strategy is doomed to failure, because innovators will not be discouraged by their heavy handed attempts to stop them, and the internet amplifies that innovation.
Expect lots of denial, gnashing of teeth, and doubled-down litigation in the near future.
Gnome3 and its ilk, are the result of developers (and especially designers) not listening to their userbase.
"But the menu based metaphor systems are so... OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for not respecting user feedback about your choices as the dev team/designer.
The same same is true for things like Pottering's systemd.
"Script based inits, like found in sysv init, are just so OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for its removal.
If you are a developer/designer, and you disagree with my attestation that just because something is old does not mean you should remove it (or replace it with something else), take this to heart:
The air you breathe now is several MILLION years old. Why not replace that old, ancient air with something new, and edgy-- like ionized plasma freshly born from inside a star!? No, you don't like that idea, because your lungs aren't able to handle highly energetic plasma? Fancy that-- your end users have systems that are not able to handle having the init system changed willy-nilly either.
Point me to the open source equivalent of SolidWorks or Adobe Premiere and then we can talk.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Put open source software in the cloud and just profit from it without ever "giving back"".
Open source developers are meant to be profited from and later replaced with H-1B holders.
Let me preface my comment by saying that I have absolutely no idea how software development works, but it seems like a case of "too many cooks in the kitchen" which naturally slows projects down because everybody wants to have a voice and dictate the direction things should go. Probably that, and delegating tasks to incompetent monkeys...
Now let's get this thinking into medical and other research, solar and other physical product development, and finally ... government. Oh yes, and that girl next door.
...omphaloskepsis often...
And the Linux Foundation will fail if they continue mollycoddling "Gold Member" licence violators like VMware.
Gnome3 and its ilk, are the result of developers (and especially designers) not listening to their userbase.
The Gnome 3 designers aren't entirely to blame for the mess. Experimentation is a good part of innovation, or we'd be stuck using the teletype terminal. The problem is the speed with which the experiment was mainlined or adopted by the major distributions as the one and only true path to desktop nirvana. If they had allowed, say, a five-year phase-in period where features are added gradually then maybe users will get used to the new supposedly touch-friendly interface. Also a "classic" interface should have been available from day one even if it wasn't the default.
A good example of how this could be done is the evolution of the Google home page. Without Googling for screenshots, who can actually tell the difference between the Google home page now and then?
Deja vu: In the 80s we had a 70ish actor as POTUS, a woman PM in the UK, and a bald leader of that other nuke superpower
Openstack was open source but lost out to AWS, Azure, Google...
In the beginning everyone was saying Openstack would win just like Linux....
LOL.
What you list is one side of the coin - trying to get too much under one hat. You'd better turn to FVWM2 or something to get a lightweight non-bloated platform.
But the other side of the coin is that with openness you get interoperability - people can build their own applications interacting with your platform. The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. The alternative is a lot of manual labor moving information between systems with the result that either the job isn't done or it's prone to error as well as being a lot slower.
Just look at the Linux kernel - it's found "everywhere" these days, and is a framework that's possible to adapt to new hardware by adding new drivers and you can remove unnecessary parts relatively easy. It's the core of many different Linux distributions ranging from small ARM to huge multicore NUMA architectures. Developers of applications for the Linux platform can therefore develop on a PC even though the application then is re-compiled to be executed on an embedded system or on a massive supercomputer. That's the point behind openness, and it started almost 50 years ago when Unix was conceived because Multics was too closed. However it didn't really take off until Linux came around where people discovered an OS that could be adapted to their solution with no heavy strings attached in the form of licensing, just navigation around the GPL constraints which aren't that cumbersome compared to Oracle or SAP licenses.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Please elaborate on what you mean.
One problem for large banks is that they are tied down in systems written in Cobol a long time ago where only few persons have a good grasp of what the system do and with parts that nobody dares to touch because it works but nobody knows why since the person who wrote that stuff once has passed on to the afterlife.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The thing is, you just just belong to a smaller user segment, that was deemed secondary to serve in order to improve the service for the primary focus groups. There isn't any conspiracy, or incompetence there. The mentioned applications were just marketed for mass needs instead of your elitistic little world.
PulseAudio has worked well for me. I have not had one single issue with it in the last 10 years or so. Systemd based systems have been more manageable, and the absolute basics like automatic service restarts are supported - unlike on initv and other legacy applications. Gnome 3 is wonderful, because it stays off my face, offers high usability, and doesn't require any fiddling out of the box. Sane defaults rule.
Banks are usually so far behind that the code that runs things is hidden behind several black boxes.
Investment banks (note, not the same thing as regular deposit banks) on the other hand are constantly pushing for faster hardware, assembly-level code at all levels to ensure their orders go out faster than their competition. That 20ms round trip time between the NASDAQ and the Banks computers means the difference of millions of dollars per second.
But banks do not, ever, benefit from open source, because they don't want to be using operating systems, drivers and software that they don't own. It's all in-house stuff.
Now, on the other hand, governments should be using open source software, it is in their best interests to ensure they don't get stuck with proprietary software vendors, and paying money for software that is often worse than off-the-shelf software. *cough*Siebel*is*awful*cough*
I've seen so many proprietary software packages that weren't in-house things from the jobs I've had in the past that I've said to myself I could write a better tool, but without having access to the API, I can't.
I think there's more an aspect of, "When people are getting a paycheck, they care less." Part of it's because following what your boss wants is not very fun.
ESR is not fashionable these days, but he has some good points about programmer motivation in the open source world.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
let's add SELinux to that list.
You don't have to use gnome3, pulse audio, or systemd if you don't want too. There are still distributions out there that shun those. Pick you poison or roll your own.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
that if you are a software company whose software doesn't fall under the "blessed trinity" then it would be SUICIDE to go FOSS as you won't be able to make enough to keep the lights on!
Ever wonder why no FOSS game has taken game of the year? Why after all these years the only "competition" to Photoshop that is FOSS is literally some kid's school project? Why all those niche applications like medical diagnosis and billing are never FOSS, or why programs like GnuCash are a bad joke compare to commercial products like Quicken and Quickbooks from a decade ago? The answer is actually quite simple which is FOSS works on the blessed trinity and if your software doesn't fit that model you have no chance to survive and your company will go under. We've seen it happen time and time again, in everything from Windows to Linux game converters to repos for commercial software to OSes themselves, if it doesn't fit the trinity model? It has zero chance.
This is why FOSS will never become the dominant license, why despite MSFT doing everything short of making a high res Goatse as the default wallpaper Windows 10 continues to grow while Linux is flatline, it all comes down to the trinity simply not working for the vast majority of software out there and without the software people want and need to do their jobs? You might as well be offering to trade their PC for a potato. For those that do not know what the blessed trinity is, its 1.- Selling services, 2.- Selling hardware, and 3.- e-begging. And if your software, which more than 95% of the software used daily by hundreds of millions qualify, doesn't work under this model? Then FOSS is suicide because you simply cannot make enough money to keep the lights on in FOSS if you don't fit the trinity model.
I really wish it wasn't so, Windows 10 is such a nightmare it actually makes the thought of the return of the Ballmernator look like the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, and Google and Apple are racing to see which one can become the most Stasi like when it comes to gathering data, but as long as FOSS is so politicized and rigid that an individual or company cannot sell more than a single copy of their software before someone else gives it away for free? Then FOSS will stay exactly where it is, a niche tool mainly used by multinationals as a way to avoid licensing fees on their servers and to not have to pay for the software which they use on their hardware...which is of course #2 on the trinity..
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Why should billionaires pay programmers anything, when they can take open source for free?
Thirty years ago RMS predicted,
YES. And you can thank Saint Stallman for the race to the bottom, which free software enabled, while you starve to death in the gutter.
"Anonymous Coward said: "After seeing how GNOME 3, systemd and PulseAudio have destroyed Linux's usability for me"
What stopped you uninstalling PulseAudio or using one of the other Linux Desktop Environments. Video demo of XFCE vs MATE vs KDE.
Init always had automatic service restarting, the "respawn" option of /etc/inittab...
Of course having a service automatically restart just masks the true problem - namely that your service doesn't stay running on its own for whatever reason.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
doesn't stay running on its own for whatever reason.
Hahahahahahahahaha yeah. Wait. You weren't joking. Come on, man! Don't you know the Unix design philosophy? Never ever do error handling ever. Kernel panic is a feature! When it crashes, you just yell into the cloud, HEY REBOOT IT!!
> The best open source software I use on a daily basis is developed by a single individual
From a business perspective that would be risky unless it is not in any way business critical.
Indeed. We have over a quarter of a million customers connecting to services that unless we take down for hardware maintainance carry on running indefinitely. Meanwhile on the other side of the fence I've seen the "just restart it" crowd fail to manage uptimes of days, with all the outages that comes with that.
Agreed, the placebo security that comes misconfigured out of the box and has consistenty over the years been shown to fail to block anything it was designed to stop. Worse, the constant lobbying by Redhat prevented better solutions making it into the kernel. Given the time Redhat takes to patch vulnerabilities compared to other distros it's a major liability to run an "enterprise" distro that cares so little about security.
After seeing how GNOME 3, systemd and PulseAudio have destroyed Linux's usability for me
Yeah damn my ability to switch audio dynamically in a modern way. Damn being able to manage system services without wading through 100 line scripts. Damn .... No actually you're right GNOME 3 can fuck right off.
are just so OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for its removal
Fortunately for you, that was never the justification to replace them.
The hell are you on about? It's open source. You're not dependent on the original developer, and you can do a code audit if it's business critical.
Both of which takes time and resources you might not have. Taking over development is more expensive then just buying license.
It is different when project has active community - there you can be reasonably sure it won't just get abandoned.
When you're using software for serious business, you don't want an active community of cowboy kids screwing around with it. You want a stable mature codebase. Abandoned is good. Abandoned means it's finished.
It's not so much about the paycheque, it's about the layers of indirection between the developer and the user. For a very small open source project, the developer and the user are the same person. The project grows and gets more users, then the developer is one of the users, but still directly in contact with people who have other use cases. Then the project grows a bit more and there are multiple developers, but they're all still users.
Then it grows a bit more, and now other people are paid to work on the project. They're paid by companies that are using the software though, so even though they're not users then their pay check depends on keeping at least some users happy. It's not ideal, but it's better than the next step.
The final step mirrors proprietary off-the-shelf software development. A company like RedHat or Canonical (or Moz Corp) starts paying developers. This company may not be using the software much, but ships a product that incorporates it. They have customers that use the software and so need to provide features that those users need, but they also need to justify why those customers should buy the new version or keep paying the support contract, so they have to demonstrate change. Once this happens, there are two layers of indirection between developers and users and the incentives are no longer aligned between the two. Software generally goes down hill at this point.
There's a related issue with open source software that's less common in COTS proprietary software: the fame issue. Once a piece of software is popular, there's a big ego boost for some people in contributing to it, because stuff that they did is widely used. There's an even bigger ego boost if a change that they made is one that everyone knows about. This gives a big incentive to change things that users will notice and those changes are not generally because the user wants them.
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A lot of banks run FreeBSD. Quite a lot still use OpenVMS. Back end stuff varies hugely and includes Linux, FreeBSD, OpenVMS, Windows, and even some more esoteric things.
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If someone came to your company and said that if you didn't purchase his product then you would fail, it would certainly sound very much like a mafia guy saying that if you didn't purchase "insurance" from him your business would fail when the building "accidentally" catches fire.
Yeah. It sounds like a threat.
"If you don't use our open source product, something might happen that will cause your business to fail, because, you know, cybersecurity failures happen all the time and you wouldn't want that. Databases get corrupted and invoices might get lost and that would be shame, right?"
Tone it down. It's bad enough when the closed-source people use those tactics.
But the other side of the coin is that with openness you get interoperability - people can build their own applications interacting with your platform. The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. The alternative is a lot of manual labor moving information between systems with the result that either the job isn't done or it's prone to error as well as being a lot slower.
However it didn't really take off until Linux came around where people discovered an OS that could be adapted to their solution with no heavy strings attached in the form of licensing, just navigation around the GPL constraints which aren't that cumbersome compared to Oracle or SAP licenses.
Here's where I like to bring up a metaphor -- I see two roles to software development: the first is to raise the ceiling -- innovate and create something better than anyone else before you, setting a new "maximum" that all software can aspire to; the other is to raise the floor -- set a new "minimum" that all software should be better than.
For instance, the existence of free implementations of quicksort, bubble sort etc raise the floor, because now everyone can write software that sorts data with the same efficiency. Meanwhile, a custom-coded adaptive sort for an accountancy system raises the ceiling, because competitors have to try to improve the performance of their sorts to be seen as being as good.
I mostly like the GPL, but the problem is that it rarely if ever raises the floor, because copyleft licenses are not completely open in the same way the C standard libraries are. Yet there are components within most GPL projects that could be used generically and could be part of the common floor, but it will never be part of the common floor until all contributors have been dead for 70 years, and given that many contributors are pseudonymous or have incredibly common names, there's no way of doing due diligence on that... not that it is likely to be relevant by that point.
Imagine if the GPL was replaced with a copyleft license that expired after 10 years -- imagine how big a common floor we'd have. All the code released would be so old that it wouldn't be of particular interest to big companies, but people would be able to revive long-dead projects as commercial packages or as labours of love. We could go back and build libraries out of the proprietary code of older projects. A higher floor.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Meh. I used Gnome 2 for years and was shocked as anybody at Gnome 3 but gave it a chance. Now there is no way in hell I would ever go back. It's simply fluid and suits my workflow. I think there just way too many people who would gladly live in the past without ever taking a chance on something new. I liken it to the XP users. They were happy (hey I was too) but c'mon, Windows 7 blew it away in terms of usability. I would argue for Gnome 3 all the same and even if not that, systemd (for all its faults) is better than sysvinit.
And you shouldn't get copyright on object code. Copyright is supposed to allow the open dissemination of the information so that people can learn from it. Closed source and binary outputs do not teach you how to write code. Books, open source necessarily, still sell, and you can learn how to write books by reading them.
And for copyright, as long as you keep the copy rights to the code, you have the responsibility to maintain it. Since you insist on being the only one who CAN, you HAVE to.
It's still not "Microsoft Windows 98" if I compile my own version of it with fixes as I see fit. The original, last released version from Microsoft is trademarked and THAT is the genuine Microsoft Windows. Mine would be "AC Windows" or whatever.
JK Rowling still made a packet with open sourced copyrighted works.
Just because you got used to copyright on non expressive code and trade secrets on the expressive part being profitable does NOT mean either that you deserve that or that you will go bankrupt. See books.
Tell me, "Red Ring Of Death" mean anything? How about "Blue Screen"? Neither are Linux formed memes. Since XP Windows has just silently rebooted itself when it could, removing the apeparance of that blue screen, but not the situation that caused it.
Gnome3 I can understand, but just use Kde instead.
But how exactly did systemd and PulseAudio destroy usability for you? Personally I found they make my desktop system much better.
I love Pulse Audio. It makes solving audio problems easy. Sound not working right? Easy fix: sudo apt-get autoremove pulseaudio
Any company depending on MS Windows is on a suicide mission. Which translates to "most people running a business now and for the last 30 years are fucking stupid".
The GPL is only one of many licenses. The Apache license, for instance, is VERY permissive, and gaining in popularity far outside the walls of the ASF itself.
So if you like the idea of open source, but dislike the GPL, you don't have to despair.
You and the parent sound like buggy whip makers... I've been using linux since '97 and I welcome and like systemd, gnome3 and (after a bit) pulseaudio. They all had/have growing pains but are turning out to pretty darn nice over all. I actually like the simplified UI of gnome3, it get the UI out of the way and lets me do actual work.
However handing respawning via inittab is like wielding a sledgehammer in a glass shop. With systemd you can enable/disable this with a easy setting on a per daemon basis and also define "only respawn X number of times during Y number of seconds" among other things.
Regarding your second opinion I tend to agree, however there exists plenty of daemons/services where a pure restart does no real harm (say a webserver, dns server and so on) and one does not exclude the other, i.e just because your daemons respawn automatically does not mean that you also dos not look into why they did.
Which have nothing to do with the issue at hand, this is about respawning crashed/downed services and not respawning just for fun.
The problem is the speed with which the experiment was mainlined or adopted by the major distributions as the one and only true path to desktop nirvana.
I don't know to which "major distributions" you refer, but Debian descendants still provide the more traditional look and feel of Xfce. To put Xfce on your Ubuntu box, for instance, run sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop
Businesses 'Will Fail' If They Don't Use Open Source Code...thats a hell of a marketing strategy but you have to remember, 7 billion people without a Start button when they sit in front of a monitor. The first think they do is pick up the phone and call their IT department for help. For the past 23 years, the global general public does not want to be educated to use Linux, they just want to retire using Windows.
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
- Steve Ballmer, then-CEO, Microsoft, 2001
Businesses that don't harvest of the shared innovation of open source software will fail.
- Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation Executive Director, 2017
Just sayin'.
I was just responding to the quote
"organizations that don't harvest the shared innovation of open source will fail. "
My point is that big organizations like banks don't seem to be failing even though they aren't using open source. True, what you describe is very brittle and could fail in the future, but so could any organization, using open source or not.
What sorry times are these when named users troll anons. That's precisely what was being discussed. Nobody restarts for fun.
--Yah, I didn't like Pulseaudio for a while but it actually comes in handy for HDMI video output and volume control (pavucontrol). Systemd I don't like (and use the Antix distro to get around it) and haven't used GNOME regularly since about 2.4.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
There's a lot of truth to that. Productivity tends to scale with N but communications overhead tends to N^2. So at some point as N increases the communications overhead will swamp actual productivity.
When employers aren't involved, eventually some subset of the developers will just do the right thing by themselves and the project moves forward. Otherwise, management enforces paying the communications overhead and nothing useful happens.
Of course, in those limited cases, a small simple C program can take care of respawning without disrupting everything else in the system. Just drop it into the init script.
It's trivially easy to dump pulseaudio and GNOME3, but systemd is somewhat harder to get rid of since it likes to dig it's tentacles into everything.
They may have used different words, but the thinking behind it boils down to "old equals bad!!!".
Or as JWZ put it, CADT!
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
And you, sir, sound like an architecture astronaut...
The thing that has made Linux the kernel so popular, but that has kept Linux the platform from ever getting a foothold on desktops, is a simple matter of API stability. Cantrill claims Torvalds was slow to get the message, but once Torvalds did he has kept the kernel devs on the straight and narrow. Meaning that once something expose a new API to userspace, said API is basically sacrosanct. You really need a good reason for mangling it, for face Torvalds ire.
Sadly the higher layers of the stack, be it developed under the Freedesktop umbrella or the big name DEs like Gnome, keep breaking their plumbing APIs at random intervals. This makes third parties wary of adopting said plumbing for their own use.
In contrast, Microsoft maintained API compatibility to an extreme degree. Until the transition to x86_64 you could still run binaries from the Windows 1.x era (Win16!) on modern Windows NT descendants. This because doing so relied on the ability to switch the CPU between 16 and 32 bit modes, and you can't switch a x86 cpu between 16 and 64 bit modes.
The above is one big reason why Windows is so entrenched on desktops.
But rather than take that to heart, the DEs keep trying to polish their UX, while breaking the APIs in the process.
Or you are prepared to take over should that individual decide to retire from the project (not usually an option with proprietary software) or the software is sufficiently mature that further development is not needed (actually fairly common in business software). Again, advantage to Free software since licensing extra copies isn't an issue.
But it's a lot cheaper than starting over from scratch if a proprietary vendor decides to cancel the project.
One big shift with the likes of Gnome was when they started pulling in UX designers.
Soon enough said designers started nixing suggestions on the mailing list not because of how hard they would be to implement or maintain, but that it would break with the "face" said designers had decided that Gnome should have.
And you see some of the same creep into KDE once they and Gnome started hosting joint developer conferences, and the focus shifted to KDE4. All of a sudden it was paramount that everything follow the same "design language", where once the big deal with KDE was that it was a toolbox of parts (Kparts) that one could plug together to do things (Konqueror could handle having one window be split between web browsing, local file system browsing, and accessing remote files, all done via different kparts).
One sad example there is how GTK3 insist on running on the latest and greatest X11 (and expect them to find a reason to drop X11 support ASAP now that Fedora defaults to Wayland) while Qt5 can still compile against "old" X11 and do its thing.
Thing is that Qt is a dual licensed toolkit that originated with Trolltech as a commercial product and is now maintained by Qt Software.
GTK3 on the other hand is on paper independent, but is maintained by Gnome developers.
Dennis Ritchie said of Unix in 1973, "If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"
In 1973, your hero Linus was a 3-year-old boy, and your buddy Bill Gates was graduating from high school.
Follow the "money".
SELinux was developed by NSA, RH has a former general on the board, Pentagon is an ever larger customer of RH.
SELinux is basically one of the checkmarks RH on their sales pitch. Along with Active Directory like management thanks to polkit, systemd, and a whole host of other "independent" projects that RH has the maintainers of on their payroll.
RHEL and similar is increasingly about developing a drop-in replacement for Windows after the debacle that was the Win2k equipped destroyer. And it is drop-in in more ways than one. Future combat crafts will have their central computing resources in a unit that can be unloaded much like a container when docked.
7 billion people without a Start button when they sit in front of a monitor. The first think they do is pick up the phone and call their IT department for help. For the past 23 years, the global general public does not want to be educated to use Linux, they just want to retire using Windows.
for the older generation who learnt how to use computers by rote rather than understanding the principles behind the interfaces they were using that may be true but younger ones are used to gadgets with different interfaces 24/7, to them sitting in front of something which doesnt have a start button doesnt send them into appaplexy
Well just for fun is how I would describe the "just restart it!" crowd that AC was talking about so I don't see your problem.
For this particular little feature of something like systemd and upstart yes, but then you have to make your solution distro agnostic, work with daemons that fork or not fork, that crashes in such a way that it brings the shell down with it and all of a sudden that small and simple program is not so small and simple any more.
I once wrote one in 10 lines of C that woule compile on every distro as well as Irix and Solaris. So very hard!
You have a serious point to make here - What is the point of effort to create a program if the life of the OS is too short? The application you made may very quite well become useless or so buggy, that no one wants to use the once useful program? Or is may be so bothersome to make it work with the new version that it does not free your time up for anything else, or improve features on your program.
This includes the obsession with open source as the "one true way". The "year of the linux desktop" is just like the second coming of the zombie space ghost bastard child.
The worst open source software I used was ubuntu 14
specifically, the version that removed all my partitions, claiming it was only going to overwrite ubuntu 12.
UX is a very useful term. HCI people who know what they're talking about don't use it, so anyone who claims to be a UX expert has helpfully self identified as someone that it's safe to ignore.
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With systemd you can enable/disable this with a easy setting on a per daemon basis and also define "only respawn X number of times during Y number of seconds"
Indeed. Like you can do with init. But let not get facts in your way of spreading systemd propaganda.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Which is why I specifically talked about copyleft licenses.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Or the userbase has shifted.
Once upon a time, it was acceptable that devices could monopolize the audio device. No longer. Once upon a time, you could count on audio devices being static. No longer. Once upon a time, you could count on users dynamically adding and removing audio devices and expecting those devices to be usable without the underlying program opening them explicitly. No longer.
It's things that Windows and macOS do just fine. You connect your Bluetooth headset (or USB headset) and automagically, your communications apps switch over to using them without you closing them, or without them explicitly opening them - they opened the audio device and didn't care which it was. The user may use the built in microphone and speakers, then wanting a bit more privacy, plug in a headset (USB, Bluetooth, it doesn't matter), and then continue their conversation in private without doing anything else. The communications app didn't close and was reopened by the user - the user simply continued their existing conversation just fine, using a new audio device that wasn't there when the app started. And without special coding on the app's part to scan for new audio devices and ask the user if they wanted to switch over to using it.
Once upon a time, network configurations never changed. No longer. Once upon a time, when you connected to a network, it was the same network. No longer. Once upon a time, when the network connected, you could use it immediately. No longer.
Users connect to wifi promiscuously. One moment, they may be at work and on the corporate LAN over WiFI. The next moment they may be at Starbucks - and seeing that the connection is open, the OS should offer to launch a VPN client (no OS does this, yet, though Nexus/Pixel Androids do ask sometimes) to connect back to the office, or offer to secure the WiFi connection. And of course, the firewall should be enabled at its strictest setting.for out-of-LAN networks.
Likewise, script-based inits make no sense - why do you emulate what init can already do - maintain daemons? If a daemon crashes or exits, init (sysvinit) can already relaunch it. And if it dies too fast, init can pause launching it for a few minutes so you can have a system youc an debug with. Plus, it keeps track of the runlevels too, so you don't have to make sure your S/K scripts balance. (And switching is so inefficient when you have to K the service, then switch over and then relaunch it afterwards if both runlevels have the same service).
Of course, every other major Unix-based OS has their own system, which should say something. (Android as well).
Just because you liked how simple things in the past were, doesn't mean today they're still relevant. Sure it's nice, but the demands of a modern OS have gotten much more complex.
This is crap. No really, there is little more content in this message than there is in, "This will really, Really be the Year of Linux on the Desktop! We mean it this time!"
All those commercial vendors, offering closed source products, yeah they are going to fail. Just because Chief Putz Jim Zemlin said so!
Anyone offering a good value added product can charge for it and they will find willing customers. Hell, there are lots of customers paying for products they aren't too happy with, or feel the product is good but the price is too high. Still customers though!
The FOSS zealots have been forecasting the End Of Microsoft (or Oracle, or SAP, or IBM, or HP, or Infor, or Intel, or Softbank, or... well, you get the idea). And they are always wrong, and no one ever calls them on it. Well, I'm calling them on it. FOSS zealots are wrong about proprietary software and the companies that market proprietary software more often than the weatherpeople are wrong about the weather. Which is to say, they are wrong a whole lot.
All this garbage is just wishful thinking. "My concept of self-worth is bound up in FOSS principles and the world must conform to me!" Yeah, OK, you keep going with that, we'll see how far it gets you.
FOSS is a mechanism that increases the rate at which value-added functions transition to commodities. It can also (when things are going well) act as a mechanism by which the customers get more input into the products they use. And it can act to lower barriers of entry for new businesses, using work released into the public domain. FOSS is interesting and useful, but when the zealots start promoting it as a social movement, and it's going to Change The World, bringing Peace, Love and Harmony, well I don't think so.
I'm speaking as someone who consistently promoted PCs and the Internet when they were new and in their high growth phases. You can change technology, you can change certain aspects of business and social environments. You cannot change human nature though. Human nature is the one thing that never changes.
Of course you can, but you also have to write quite a bit of shell script in order to do that and not just alter a simple setting. And you would still fall through all manners of possible problems with pid-matching and so on that have plagued any such prior attempt via inittab.
And if it never got the SIGCHLD since signals does not have a delivery guarantee under any OS how well does your 10-line fork+execve+waitpid program work then?
And what if the daemon in question does a fork of it's own then your 10-liner gets the SIGCHLD while the daemon is running just fine and you will never get the SIGCHLD from the grandchild so you now have to add several lines more to read in a pid file and also hope that the daemon in question stores the running pid in such a file and further you have to hope that of the grandchild dies then another process that is spawned in between does not get the same pid as your grandchild. At the same time something like systemd handles all these corner cases and more due to it actually being init and not a separate process/script.
In short, the reason to implement functionality such as this into either systemd or upstart is for the distro maintainers to be able to support respawning for all different kinds of strange daemons. I get that you #1 don't want respawning to begin with and #2 only have to support a handful of such daemons but I do hope that you understand that there are others with complete different needs than yours?
Otherwise we end up with horrendous examples like the mysqld_safe script which was Oracle/SUNs try at doing this distro agnostic with sysvinit. They didn't exactly succeed to put it mildly.
It never missed. Of course it was written for the daemon it was respawning.
However, now that cgroups is a thing, I could write one that never misses for any program. It would still be a lot less disruption to just drop that in than it is to use systemd.
Or, I could just use PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER to make the respawner instance become the parent of any children of the daemon so that I just have to see if I still have child processes. Not available when I wrote the 10 liner, but available now.
Of course, systemd isn't a perfect solution either. For example, if a daemon forks and exits and then the child process gets stuck but doesn't terminate, systemd won't know about it. A custom restarter could check for that condition as needed.
if (ch->count >= MAXSPAWN) {
initlog(L_VB,
"Id \"%s\" respawning too fast: disabled for %d minutes",
ch->id, SLEEPTIME / 60);
That said, I'm not sure why/how you need pid matching for a process that crashed and hence does not have a pid anymore.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
pid-matching is needed in the situation where the underlying deamon forks and thus the daemon is running as a grandchild to your monitoring process. Then the only way that your process can see if the grandchild is running is to check if the pid that it stored in a pid-file is running, however due to the limited space of pids (they are only 16 bits) there can spawn a different process that gets the same pid as your grandchild between the moment the grandchild crashes and your process detects that it's down which would make your monitoring process erroneously believe that the grandchild is still running.
This all becomes moot of course if you are init since you then have complete control over grandchildren, even more so if you also are the cgroups master.
Well if you only care about deamons that you write your self then yes this is a no problem as you write but as a distribution one have to think about all those strange and different daemons out there.
Of course, systemd isn't a perfect solution either. For example, if a daemon forks and exits and then the child process gets stuck but doesn't terminate, systemd won't know about it. A custom restarter could check for that condition as needed.
For the random daemon out there yes but it the daemon supports systemd it can send heartbeats to systemd with "sd_notify (0, "WATCHDOG=1");" in order to catch a stalled deamon. systemd itself can also send heartbeats upwards to a harware watchdog so your whole server gets a reboot if the whole system stalls.
You missed it! I could use the very code that systemd uses only isolated as a small restarter utility and get the same results with far less disruption to the system as a whole. It's what they should have done in the first place. The only reason systemd is better at restarting than the old restarters is that it can rely on cgroups to do the heavy lifting and that didn't exist years ago.
It's the same reason systemd hasn't tried to consume *BSD or Mac.