Richard Stallman and the Unix Philosophy
Yesterday's photos (in the UK, 24 hours ago):
Dr. Stallman (RMS) is a smart person. He can also be reasonable and persuaded if things are presented to him convincingly enough (speaking from experience). Contrary to the myth or the malicious stigma, he's not hard-headed and he can be nice, even very polite unless he can sense you're being a facetious a-hole.
When asked about systemd people must remember that RMS speaks as an active Board member of the FSF and also the founder of the FSF. IBM and Red Hat both spent many years sponsoring the FSF and participating in the GNU Project, which is the "baby" of RMS. IBM and Red Hat turned some GNU volunteers from unpaid hackers into paid staff. They could make a living by making Free software.
To be perfectly clear, my general and honest view of RMS is that he's a reasonable person who knows when "rocking the boat" puts him at too great a risk. My view/take on Red Hat is that it used to be OK (the first GNU/Linux distro I used was Red Hat) and I used to have a lot of respect for IBM, back when it was still dominant in the 80s and 90s, even if it had abused its position in the market. Many folks of my generation grew into "IBM-compatible" PCs.
In the late 90s and for a period of about one decade IBM was very supportive* - for selfish and strategic reasons perhaps - of GNU, Linux, and key standards such as OpenDocument Format (ODF). RMS didn't have good reasons to blast IBM or Red Hat back then. Novell was another matter after it had colluded with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer.
RMS has worked with computers and practised his technical skills as a programmer (when coding was still harder) since before Microsoft even existed. The GNU Project and FSF did not exist as a response to Microsoft. They've both consistently had the same goal; the adversaries changed. Either new companies jeopardised the mission or particular companies became more hostile towards it over time**.
Earlier this year an article in some blog said (the context being "Comments on Shared Unix Hosting vs. the Cloud") that "overall, the options seem thin. Unix hosting is no longer a commodity."
With our current hosting plan we use classic Debian 12, no control panels or anything like that. We don't need and we don't want vendor lock-in. However, a reader recalls "decommoditization of Linux and the Halloween Documents", remembering correctly how companies wanted to get people glued to their offerings through "decommoditization" and Microsoft sought to exploit that or encourage it. Microsoft saw decommoditization as an attack plan on Linux's (and GNU's) growing dominance more than 2 decades ago. That does not mean Microsoft alone is "at it". The reader alludes to systemd and mentions "the pursuit of all that by IBM / Red Hat" (remember that leadership of systemd drifted very gradually towards Microsoft, even if stewardship has long been Microsoft's, more so after it bought GitHub).
5 years ago, based on personal experiences (at work), I explained why "AWS is Not GNU/Linux" and cautioned that under the guise of "Clown Computing" we are being trapped. Even the "free" or "open" systems get entangled and complexity gets sold as "ease of use" (as long as you don't change vendors; Canonical tries this with "Snaps" and more).
One side point might be, based on this new article ("Gmail’s New Encrypted Messages Feature Opens a Door for Scams"), even E2EE for E-mail is under attack. From something simple and reliable now they shill 'webmail' and it goes wrong:
“When the recipient is not a Gmail user, Gmail sends them an invitation to view the E2EE email in a restricted version of Gmail,” Google wrote in a blog post. “The recipient can then use a guest Google Workspace account to securely view and reply to the email.”
E-mail became a scam-worthy mess and you should probably stop outsourcing E-mail. As usual, as noted in relation to the EFF, we're not talking about E2EE here; the EFF creates/perpetuates a confusion while throwing FUD at PGP (called "e-fail"; they cannot distinguish between E-mail and Web pages sent 'as an E-mail'!) and while the above is indeed dangerous, the reader argues it is "not-E2E, [just another] proprietary system".
It has long been said by many people online: GMail is not E-mail. GMail is Google GMail. Similarly, GitHub is not Git but a proprietary system looking to replace Git. This is an excellent example of how "decommoditization" works and what it does. As many people are aware, hosting one's E-mail became difficult because a proprietary cabal looking to replace E-mail with their proprietary webmail bloatware have made mail relays very hostile to all but few large vendors which spy on everything. What's more, Microsoft added 'extensions' atop E-mail, so in practice many people receive .dat files and other arbitrary nonsense. They're killing E-mail; it is a multi-staged process of decommoditization. It can take years, even decades. They 'torture' people who don't play along, causing peers to send them things they cannot handle.
Going back to IBM, consider processors and what x86 has done to computer security. Many chips were shipped broken or defective (even when the companies knew about the defects), resulting in incidents and serious performance degradation. To companies like Intel it boiled down to simple "economic" factors; ship garbage, then fix it along the way. Don't wait, don't test "too much". They added all sorts of dodgy and dangerous "extensions" (think decommoditization) and in more recent years Linus Torvalds blasted some of these (albeit only after they had been phased out).
Meanwhile IBM made its own designs, though it seems to be abandoning them so it might go down like the other company name starting with an "I". A new comment says:
POWER is NEVER mentioned by Arvind or R Thomas etc. All IBM cares about now is mainframe (monopoly), software and services (Consulting, not managed svcs like the old kyndryl stuff). Power went from a $5B business to under 2. All IBM keeps talking about and paying people to try and MOVE/PUSH long time Power on premises customers to PowerVS Power Virtual server which is running Power systems in IBM's 16 data ctrs and seems to no longer want on prenmises sales. IBM TLS also seems to no longer want to fund SSRs to do IBM on premises svcs but keeps trying to hype TLS for MVS mutiple vendors svscs (ie IBM service Cisco, Checkpoint etc). IBM has intentionally massively moved jobs to India including Power and no longer really has solid customer relationships since they PIP sales perf improvement plans every 6 months and hires RCG recent college grads to keep labor costs low and none of these new people have ever sold or been in a data ctr. IBM sends the RCGs to GSS Global Sales School where they are told they are the smartest people on the planet and then come out and get a laptop and quota and told to sell. That's it. Sad. I could see Power be sold to Dell or Oracle of Lenovo to be milked for awhile. I do not see PowerVS catching on nor do I see IBM moving their hyped 10,000 SAP customers to PowerVS for SAP RISE but like a record player stuck on the same groove, you just keep hearing the same old lame story.
"Still plenty of big customers using Power," a later comment said. "Not sure why though..."
IBM promoted ODF once upon a time. Not anymore.
Communication tools? Slack. Because who in IBM needs standards anyway? They could use Jabber or Matrix or even good old IRC (it is not going away and IBM can host it locally).
So that discussion leads us back to RMS, who is sort of caught in the middle because IBM staff is in so many GNU communities.
Does RMS still believe in the Unix way of building things? Yes***. He's routinely asked about this, but freedom matters to him more than pertinent functionality being atomic.
Maybe one day RMS will be more vocal in criticism or condemnation of systemd, nowadays exceedingly led by and hosted by Microsoft. Microsoft's vision of "Linux" is just something that it controls (i.e. it controls users) via Azure or similar spyware. It already integrates it with TPMs and other terrible things via systemd. █
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* IBM was very supportive of Linux, the kernel, and then it fought against SCO in court for well over a decade. At the same time IBM did a lot of promotion and advocacy of ODF along with Sun. Sun's and IBM's support was needed because Microsoft had infiltrated the private and public sector which gave it clout and bribery opportunities.
** Somebody wanted an explanation or clarification of IBM's attitude change, saying this was needed especially if it is associated with infiltration by Microsofters. In Red Hat we covered plenty of examples of managerial roles being given to 'former' Microsoft managers. In the case of IBM, it has long acted as habitual reseller of Microsoft with various partnerships. Unlike Red Hat, IBM deployed many Windows machines. Customers asked for Windows, IBM delivered. Sometimes IBM would even recommend it.
*** To be more specific, what RMS would typically say about systemd (if asked) is related to its licence or the ability to fork it (even if it's way too monolithic, releases are too frequent, and several other factors discourage any effective forking). Sometimes clarifications are needed as to what exactly he said because we keep hearing stuff like, "RMS never talks about it"; he does actually, typically because people keep asking after his talks (questions and answers). The GNU and FSF sites do not have a more formal or official statement though; they do not speak about this project directly, even if it feels like they sometimes talk about the general theme/s. The reason why RMS is caught in the middle, in case it's not obvious, is that the project (systemd and others like it) undermines the idea or the talking point about the licence being sufficient to ensure users' freedom. It would seem like double standard to disown it, set aside the issue of IBM's financial strings (now tied together to Red Hat's).