On 02/04/2015 03:03 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: > >>>> Is not ISIL a better analogy? > > But not the analogy I was driving at. The Taliban is a movement that > started focused on Afghanistan - a revolutionary movement. ISIL's > mission is to (re)establish an Islamic Caliphate over a broad swatch of > territory (kind of like the Borg). The later seems a lot more like what > is happening with systemd. > > Miles Fidelman > >
The "Islamic Caliphate" and the general media attention of ISIL seem to me to respond to an ideological warfare painted in Samuel Huntington's 1996 opus "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order". Honestly, considering "The West" and "Islam(ism)" as monolithic entities fighting each other is a bit like confusing porn with eroticism, or McDonald's with food -- or war with peace. This heavy tendency of "Western" ideologists and mass media to draw subtle portraits with chainsaws and bulldozers is not at all helpful neither in understanding the phenomenon of the rise of ISIL in the Middle-East nor to understand the various forms of Islam, nor to understand each other as human beings, and of course it does not help bringing a sane view of complexity. I like Poettering's own choice of the Borg, because it illustrates the contradiction and paradox of his real-fictional action. Systemd is doing to the free software world what Microsoft was doing in its time to the computer world: it pushes the incentives of "progress", in the sense of fugue, to wrap a monolithic construct (Linux) with a monolithic shell (systemd) that will do it all and better than anyone else just because, please don't ask, you should know. Yes, the Borg. An invasive, unavoidable plague that will make its way like a caries down to the core of an aching tooth. I've seen the presentation with all the Borg illustrations, and frankly, I thought on some slides: how is that an advantage? Certainly Mr. Poettering is in love with his own mind and logic, but I would certainly not appreciate his poetry. The concept of "Pensée Unique", the "unique train of thought" that is delivered year after year by the all powerful "too big to fail" Western ideology has brought its heavy muddy boots into the free software world. That most of distributions adopted systemd however remains less a sign of quality and engineering prowess than a mix of developer laziness, good marketing, and general short-sightedness -- remember SSL is still around, and there's nothing worse than a bad idea whose time has come. That said, I wish the Devuan community-in-the-making would bring to a halt the criticism of Systemd and especially when it comes to demonizing it and making hardly appropriate comparisons, and start focusing on how we can make the best *universal* free software operating system that is not stuck in monomania, in bureaucracy, nor in the 1990s (although it should definitely be working on HDDs as well). Regards, == hk -- _ _ We are free to share code and we code to share freedom (_X_)yne Foundation, Free Culture Foundry * https://www.dyne.org/donate/ _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
