I’m sure you’ve all by now read the announcement of systemd, and have probably come running to my blog to see what the reaction of Ubuntu and the Upstart author is!
As you know, improvements to the boot process has been something that Ubuntu have been working on for a few years now and this led to the development of Upstart. We’re not the only ones working in this area, Intel have also been hard at work with different improvements of their own with the Moblin and MeeGo projects.
So it’s great to see some Fedora and OpenSuSE guys working on this too, and bringing some different ideas to the table!
I can’t say I disagree with some of Lennart’s observations about problems with Upstart, it’s certainly nowhere near perfect. Now that the stable period leading up to the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is over, I’m looking forwards to getting back into the code and trying to address them.
It’s far too early to tell which approach is going to work out better in the end; but that’s one of the great things about Linux. The different distributions are able to develop in different directions, and we’re able to try out many different things.
On a personal note, I’m particularly pleased that Lennart has continued the punny naming scheme I began with Upstart. System D is a French concept that embraces responding to challenges when they happen, thinking fast and on your feet and adapting and improvising to get the job done.
Scott
Congratulations on your positive response to systemd, glad to see you taking it as a welcome challenge.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the update.
Maybe off topic, but a person at a thing recently asked me why Ubuntu doesn’t used launchd (see http://developer.apple.com/MacOsX/launchd.html). I didn’t have a good answer. What should I have said?
Let the good-willed competition commence! Good luck to both projects, and thanks for remaining positive.
While having a choice is good in certain situations, it isn’t always so. Having 3 different startup systems for linux would be terrible. Just like having several desktop environments is bad (GNOME, KDE, XFCE….). If all the developers would focus on one startup system and make that one really good, it would be much better than having several of them and all of them sux. Same if KDE people instead helped GNOME people to make a better product. Thats the problem with Linux as an operating system. Every distribution does it in it’s own way, duplicating much of the work and dividing people and developers.
Having multiple applications for the same thing is great. Having multiple core subsystems is BAD. The foundations must be solid, stable and predictable. Having choice on such a low level isn’t good.
It would be best for everyone if all work on “next generation service manager” would be done together by all the major distros out there, so we have ONE, GOOD solution to the problem. It would really rock!
Matic,
GNOME (aug 1997) was a response to KDE (oct 1996) being developed, so really it should have been the GNOME people helping out with KDE…
I’m not sure I agree with the rest of your argument but if anyone should have helped out it should have been the GNOME guys helping the KDE ones.
“It would be best for everyone if all work on “next generation service manager” would be done together by all the major distros out there, so we have ONE, GOOD solution to the problem. It would really rock!”
Different people have different ideas – the best one will win out as Linux is a meritocracy, and the winner will no doubt have elements of the others included.
Chris,
“GNOME (aug 1997) was a response to KDE (oct 1996) being developed” – QT wasn’t free by the means of open source free at that time. Thats why it was started. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(framework)#Licensing
Matic,
The Bazaar can loud, messy, uncoordinated, and inefficient. It does have a certain charm, however, and many people find it sufficiently compelling to put up with the mess. The alternative is the Cathedral. It’s your choice. There’s a popular operating system available that only has one type of service manager and windowing system. Microsoft will gladly sell you a copy.
Matic, there will always be competing alternatives, that is unavoidable, and it is good. It is completely unrealistic to expect that every open source developer that wants to contribute in an area should do it in cooperation with every other developer in the same area. This is evolution in progress. Different alternatives are tried out, good ones are borrowed / shared. Do you also want there to be only one brand of cars, one type of soda, one type of toothpaste?
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@Jonathan Lange:
launchd wasn’t used for the made-up reason that it supposedly wasn’t free software.
That however was a flat-out lie, because even the old APSL was considered free by the FSF/GNU project.
The APSL (just as launchd’s current Apache License) is not compatible with the GPLv2, but a system initialization daemon doesn’t need to be, because nothing links against it.
Hello Scott,
As I am running Gentoo Linux I am free to replace parts of my system as needed. So I can test them in a ‘real world environment’ Booth concepts have their weaknesses and good points – but I’d suspect only time will show what concept really does the trick.
So good luck and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for booth of you.
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Andrius wrote:
“QT wasn’t free by the means of open source free at that time. Thats why it was started.”
Not to rehash history even further but the sane answer to this would have been to implement a compatible toolkit (think lesstif here), or adapt GTK to be a drop in replacement. Most of the original GNU tools were drop in replacements for (and improvements on) non-free tools, not different tools with similar effects. At the very least GTK should have been made to be able to use QT themes.
To get back on topic, and to reply to Matic, upstart is one approach to fixing problems with sysvinit and systemd is another approach. Unlike KDE and GNOME, or QT and GTK, there is not a lot of work to change between them (ie, everything need not be rewritten). Whichever one wins will likely win after absorbing whatever features were found to be beneficial in the other.
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@Markus: “because even the old APSL was considered free by the FSF/GNU project.”
I’m not sure what you mean by the “old” APSL but no revision of APSL 1.x is a free software license.
APSL v1.0 is not a free software license. The FSF said so at the time pointing out specific major problems with the license.
Apple made APSL v1.1 which turned out to be little better than v1.0 (“Apple released an updated version, 1.1, of the APSL but it remained unacceptable. They changed the termination clause into a “suspension” clause, but it still had the same kind of bad effects.”).
APSL v1.2 was also non-free. The FSF notes
The APSL was not a free software license until version 2.0. Despite Apple’s revisions the APSL still has two significant problems: “It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with other files which may be entirely proprietary.” and “It is incompatible with the GPL.” but neither of these prevent the APSL from being a free software license.
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