what "freedom of choice?"

$ echo "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this." | grep oice | wc -l
0
$

im predicting proposal f. its the most cynical choice, its bound to win.

this is like american idol-- a pageant where we finally learn what they already wanted as a result.

i take the history of this stuff about as seriously as a non-expert can, and ive spent some time working on a timeline, so i want to correct this.

until 1980, software wasnt copyrightable in the usa (where both bsd and the gpl are from) and thus the notion of "software freedom" had little reason to exist before the 80s.

bsd started in the 1970s, with work on 1bsd beginning in 74 and 2bsd being released in 79.  so im not sure its fair to say it "was created not for freedom" or possible to say "it was initially created to help proprietary software development" although the first full bsd system did come out in 1983.

its true that gnu is most likely the first operating system created specifically to advance software freedom though. and i think its unlikely that there will be a better option in the near future, though im still in favour of people exploring options.

i would be surprised if debian supported raspberry pi 4 and devuan didnt sooner or later-- unless the person in charge of raspberry pi in devuan left recently.

i would also be very surprised if debian didnt support raspberry pi 4 but devuan did. so, im assuming that debian either does, or will soon.

i could answer that directly, and tell you exactly what is wrong with him personally, which certainly is a factor in this.

so its not in his defense when i say that i think a more complete answer to your question goes up a level to his superiors. this is true even if he never worked for red hat or ibm directly. the sort of anti-culture that he serves, that suits his personality is the broader problem here.

monopoly, control, exploitation, outright theft. whats theirs is theirs, and whats ours is also theirs. if there were no lp then they would find another person like him. that doesnt get him off the hook, though i think the broader problem is closer to the cause of all this.

also, i dont think he could (or does) do all this alone. there are so many green lights needed to get this far-- hes mostly got the support of the tech press, he does have support from larger companies who love to gain more control of our ecosystem (i think thats the primary cause here) and hes got lots of people supporting him who have the same "problem" that he has.

and beyond that, the people whose job it is to stand up to this, arent. im talking about the "fsf", which i have spent more than a year lobbying and looking for allies with. and i think i found them, though you have seen what happened to that organisation and its leader. what jaromil and dyne.org said about it was the best example of what ought to be said.

5 years ago, we had a lot of theories about systemd, and ive looked for evidence that those theories are ridiculous and also evidence that they arent.

i think if you average them all together so the details are less focused and a general theme is found, those theories are pretty incredibly accurate. the more ive found, the worse it is. of course some of the specific details are probably wrong, but they cant all be right.

but whether you look at microsoft, ibm or a few universities, we speculated about certain people and certain institutions years ago-- since that time, there are more possible (and more interesting) connections with them, not fewer. certainly we can blame lp and his over-the-top arrogance. he didnt win that pwnie for nothing, he earned that thing.

but theres something a lot bigger than lp here. hes sort of a useful idiot-- very useful (to them) and very idiotic, experience and wisdom dont make you as cheerfully condescending and controlling as that guy. he just screams dunning-kruger and the dunning-kruger world cheers it on. but hes not leading the attacks on the ecosystem. hes helped develop a software weapon, and cheered it on like any clueless, billion-dollar corporate-backed developer would do in his situation.

i dont think hes the mastermind, i honestly dont think hes got half a clue what the real implications of his own software are. that doesnt mean he isnt arrogant, malicious or at fault here. he plays a significant role. but in a clueless way.

think of george w. bush during the 2003 invasion. might as well have lennart stand on top of a giant server farm with a banner that says "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED." bush definitely did not mastermind any of whats happened in the middle east, but we sure had to hear to a lot of his cheerful, ignorant crap about what a great job was being done, and what a problem critics can be.

dont let the sabs at debian off the hook either. without them, this would affect us a lot less.

ive been watching trump since 2016, and people blame everything in the world on him, like these problems are new. im not saying trump is blameless either, but the problems already existed and ive spent the past few years looking at him as a really obvious symptom as much as a cause.

you can look at lp as a symptom too. hes a festering eurotrash boil of a developer, i only wish he were the disease itself. that would be so much easier to fix, if we could attribute everything that has gone wrong to a single person. we could just impeach-- it may help, though the broader problem is the one i think we really need to fix.

heres something to take away from this-- the best developers in the world care more about what theyre trying to do, and implementation follows from there.

when systemd fans beat their chests over how superior their talent and knowledge of their domain is, they are obsessed with their implementation. thats not a sign of a software designer, its the sign of a very virulent, zombie killer codemonkey. these guys arent masterminds at all. people keep saying they cant design software, and its absolutely true. but if they cant design software, what does that tell you?

if systemd were designed well, it wouldnt need the entire ecosystem to conform to it. that would be considered insanely inefficient, which for the people sponsoring systemd is a feature-- the burgeoning design cost is something only a large corporation can maintain. ibm is a machine-- it pays coders to do stupid things, and when it no longer suits them they ax the project.

but systemd gives them control, and all they have to do is keep paying people to do dumb things and force everybody else to work around it-- to work for ibm for free.

if systemd had a design at all, there would be sane limits on what it accomplishes. there are none. if it were designed, people would say "ok it needs to interface with this, it needs to stop here, it needs to kowtow to this signal or process or design here." it does none of that. it simply marches on, and everybody bows to it. runaway processes ought to be killed, but this one is whitelisted.

everybody who whitelists this runaway process is doing an absolutely terrible job. it brings down everything else, and ibm is just fine with that.

exactly. this process is a complete sham, and since late 2014 debian has used their incredible bureaucracy not to protect debians development, but to undermine it and hand it over to bad actors.

"assume good faith" if youre ridiculous; it was a coup. this is only happening as people have worked too hard for whats right, and they need to hand more of debians priorities over to red hat. they should tell them to get out, and take gnome with them. honestly, it would be less work to fork gtk than to work around all this constant sabotage.

what you get right that they get wrong, is they stick with theory while reality is right in front of them.

theory is important and gps is useful, but if the gps tells you to drive into the lake, its time to ignore it and steer the car based on common sense. sometimes being free means looking at the real situation right in front of you. thats what we do with systemd, while the fsf tells us to go ahead and drive into the lake: because reasons--

im a huge fan of the fsd, but their commentary misses a few points that are obvious to the rest of us. ive spent 5 years trying to prove to these people that "free in license only" is a thing, that there is such a thing as "free, but less free" and i even rewrote the halloween documents to demonstrate that people have spent no fewer than 20 years working up to this point where free software can be co-opted.

it becomes our job to tell people about this, because they are not doing it. but at least they have their reasons, eh? i mean they make good arguments, they just really fail the reality test in this situation. its alright if we talk about whats right in front of us, we dont need permission, or approval. and i guess its time we did their job for them. a few other people are doing it too: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Fr … Federation

just to give you an idea of how much we are on the same page about that, i recently said:

i have a problem with free software being increasingly taken over by large companies that dont care about us and even try to stop us from having our own solutions. first they lend a hand, then they take whats ours with both hands. then they say theyre the ones who really made it anyway.

why does that matter? they think they have a right to control it.

sometimes that depends on how close you are to the parties involved.

i wouldnt say im impartial-- id probably trust jaromil to the ends of the earth, but ive been on the wrong (unfair) end of the other person involved. so one has my trust and the other doesnt.

with that said, in these things its usually everyone who is somewhat to blame-- in different amounts, about which can (but who wants to) quibble.

i think for a five-year old project that started with big promises, devuan needs to be a little bit more realistic (and less shoot-the-messenger) about critics. you cant say "criticising devuan is like kicking a puppy"-- im pretty sure jim zemlin already has that trademarked for criticising microsoft. i think what even jaromil doesnt get is that dyne has earned its good reputation, and it cant simply "bestow" that on devuan. like every other distro, devuan has to earn its reputation from users. i have no problem with devuan defending itself against unfair critiques, but there are times when that is given more priority than even helps devuan.

its their distro if thats how they want to do things-- but instead of helping, it ultimately costs more.

i dont think anything would help devuan more than a better relationship with users and the broader community. please remember, i think devuan got the short end of the stick with regards to debian, i think "devuaneers" were treated unfairly and still get smeared on mailing lists. on linuxquestions i was actually saying something good about devuan, but someone else chose to call developers/users "nuts" with regards to security.

ive got my critiques but i still stand up for devuan when its called for. fighting systemd (and things like it) are important and underrated. i like to give credit where credit is due. but that goes both ways.

circling the wagons isnt a solution, but i think devuan is prone to it already. whatever you guys decide to do, its your choice, but people will continue to call you on it. the surest way around that being important is to just strive for excellence, and focus on the least fair critiques-- understand where they come from, and refute them with decency.

but its your distro, you can do what you want. and people will say what they say. some of it may reflect on devuan, some of it may not.

yeah, thanks to everybody for their replies, no worries hevy.

thanks very much!

he might not care about whats libre-- i dont know, what i do know is that among the people who stayed with debian, he has spent a great deal of effort throwing his veteran status into supporting init freedom.

if im wrong about that, it resolves the two issues at least. init freedom isnt the only freedom, but its one of the more underrated and underrepresented freedoms. steve litt calls the problem "gratuitous interdependency", i call it redix (anti-posix) and alexandre oliva of the fsf is even entertaining the concept of "punix" (a watered down, corporate monopoly posix to undermine the standard.) the catchiest one so far is "osps" (open source proprietary software) which does a very good job of illustrating the direction they are headed in, though i hate to use a term that lends undue credence to "open source" in the first place.