On being political

From a blog from Mark Shuttleworth:

Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is.

From upstart vs systemd article for the Debian tech committee by the Upstart maintainer and Debian tech committee member:

SystemD is “greedy”. Most of the recent arguments about why it’s dangerous to adopt upstart instead of systemd center around features that are being built into systemd in a manner that can’t be separated out (e.g., cgroup management in PID 1). There is an advantage to the implementor to put these features in-process in init, because it ensures early availability with no concerns about startup ordering at boot, but it commits downstreams to a monolithic design with respect to parts of the system architecture which are not settled questions in the wider ecosystem. Debian should take a principled position regarding its future architecture, and not find itself at the mercy of other parties who wish to dictate design to us.

Nothing political to see, move along people! 😛 Amazing how lack of features in one project is turned into “principled stance” against the other.

5 Replies to “On being political”

    1. Both work for Canonical, both with the same strange way of writing systemd (“SystemD”). Mark said that systemd is being political (or whatever project, it doesn’t really matter), while I fail to see that. Now Upstart/Canonical is asking Debian to make a political statement. Behaviour seems to conflict.

      1. How is “Upstart/Canonical is asking Debian to make a political statement”? Steve Langasek contributes to that thread as a long-time Debian volunteer (longer than he’s a Canonical employee and far before it), not as a Canonical employee representing Canonical or their interests.

        Are you representing your employer in all of your mailing posts and blog posts? Even if this is the case for you (I honestly don’t know), do you think that this is the case for everyone? Shall I hold e.g. RedHat accountable (and liable) for every statement made by RedHat employees on open source mailing lists?

        1. Quite easy: before Mark is saying something about other people, check if your own house is in order. For that it doesn’t matter if maybe one person is making a personal statement or not. Mark suggests that systemd (or whatever) is being political, while Upstart (which has a Canonical CLA, etc) is clearly being political regarding systemd.

          That’s just bad!

          And yeah, being the maintainer of Upstart and a Canonical employee you should sort of watch out what you say.

          Regarding trying to change it to me personally: I don’t talk about work.

          1. Faidon doesn’t work for Canonical. I don’t think he was trying to misdirect the discussion by asking you your stance on discussing work; he was trying to relate Steve’s situation to your own in an attempt to explain why Steve may remain unbiased in the tech ctte.

            As for why both Steve and Mark referred to systemd as “SystemD”, this seems like a minor typographical coincidence to me, and not some kind of campaign to damage systemd’s reputation with capital letters. Honestly some things are simply not stabs at the other camp. One might just as well suspect you of something underhand for not attributing Steve’s quote to him, whilst attributing Marks to him, as to them both using some extra capitalisation when referring to systemd. But I’m sure there was no reasoning behind that in fact, it just happened.

Comments are closed.