Re: (Really) Free Software future

[Svante Signell <svante.signell@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 2019-10-14 at 22:41 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> If systemD is be hard to replace, that is a kind of lock-in.  But it
> isn't _vendor_ lock-in.  systemD, like most free software packages,
> is not tied to any particular vendor.  Indeed, the usual concept of
> "vendor" for free software is not applicable to free software at all.

Sorry Richard, but it is really a vendor lock-in. As you know there is
only one _upstream_ of systemd and that upstream is a company. Systemd
software is developed by that company, and as you also know is that
contributions, patches and bug reports coming from outside that company
are frown upon. People reporting issues are even met with hostility.

In case you have counterexamples of the above, please give links,
please!

Additionally, software system distributors, like Debian, are fully in
the hands of the upstream. They are merely users of systemd, trying to
tweak the code to create distributions.

I know that there are partial forks of systemd like eudev and elogind,
but such forks should not be needed if upstream created and documented
libraries and APIs so that third-party people could adopt and
contribute their (maybe complementary) software too. But that is not
happening, because if upstream would do that they'd loose their market
advantage.

In conclusion: systemd is a _vendor_ lock-in. Fortunately Guix/Shepherd
are not (yet??) using systemd, but they use e.g. eudev and elogind.

Thank you for your time!