FREE SOFTWARE IS BUSINESS (RE: ZLG)

ZLG recently posted a long piece about the politics of free 
software and why it shouldn't/can't be ignored:
gopher://zlg.space:70/0/articles/Software/./free-software-is-politics.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7ezlg/0036_free-software-is-politics.txt

It starts around the topic of Systemd adoption being debated in the 
Alpine Linux community. The endless Systemd debate is definitely 
political, I agree (and I'm on ZLG's side, against it, as well), 
but I think the interesting thing is the force behind it.

Here I'm not talking specifically about Red Hat, but in general 
about commercial interests in the Linux ecosystem. In short you've 
got the divergents, key examples being Apple and Google, who took 
free UNIX code as the basis for their own Operating Systems but 
developed them independently from that point. Then you've got the 
collaborators, in particular Red Hat and SuSE, who made Linux 
itself their product, taking market share away from the old, 
proprietary, commercial UNIX systems.

The divergents need to maintain a complete software environment for 
their derrived OSs, funded by hardware sales (of hardware which, as 
it happens, usually doesn't have very good support in Linux). On 
the other hand the collaborators have a lot of work done for them 
by all the different companies and individuals contributing to both 
the Linux kernel itself, and the huge variety of software running 
atop it. With things like X, they've even been using code 
originally written in large part by the old commercial UNIX 
companies that they (to some extent) replaced.

The trouble is that they want to build the best product to suit 
their particular clients, who don't represent Linux users as a 
whole. So if they decide that their clients are best (or most 
cheaply, in terms of development costs) served by changing a basic 
feature of Linux distros such as the init or windowing system, the 
only way they can pull this off while retaining the advantage of 
having other people write and debug code that works in combination 
with it, is to push for its widespread adoption. If they don't 
achieve this, then they'll just end up with their own equivalent of 
Apple's Darwin or Google's Android, started from other people's 
code but relying entirely on their own programmers to move it 
forward down a separate path.

So maybe for users things like Systemd adoption are political 
issues, but for a Red Hat software project team it's a matter of 
existance. If they develop something like Systemd and _can't_ get 
it into the wider Linux ecosystem, then it doesn't get integrated 
into the collaberative environment that they're relying on. Other 
people don't design their software to integrate with it, don't 
write tutorials for it, and generally leave it up to Red Hat to 
make everything work themselves. Red Hat don't have anything like 
the money of Google or Apple, so in the long run they can't afford 
to let that sort of divergence take root.

The benefits from commercial collaborators in the Linux ecosystem 
flow both ways of course. With X for example, Red Hat filled a gap 
from the big corporations such as Sun, DEC, and IBM, who once 
contributed to the open-source reference X implementaion from which 
their proprietary X servers (and the free XFree86) were derrived, 
in order to maintain compatibility. Now that the Red Hat developers 
have all moved over to Wayland, the Xorg server's future currently 
relies on a release manager working in his spare time for Patreon 
donations:
https://www.patreon.com/p12tic

In this regard the opinions of users, and even individual 
developers, are easily overwhelmed by the basic power of a company 
paying developers to work on stuff. Whatever politics goes on in 
the mailing lists and forums, the commodity of open-source software 
is code, and while collaborating, people are also selling their 
code in exchange for influence. As well as a political environment 
it is a market environment, producing for some a free device to 
serve a function they need themselves, and for others a product 
they can sell on for profit (even by the indirect means of 
commercial support).

So far this hasn't worked out all that badly. I don't like Systemd 
or PulseAudio but I can generally avoid them. Though edge cases do 
creep in such as setting up a VPS with a service that only offers 
Systemd-based distro images for use, and Firefox offering better 
support for PulseAudio sound than ALSA. But free open-source 
software is still young as a concept, and it's not clear whether 
the balance of power (which here is the balance of code) will 
remain steady, so that the options for users remain open.

 - The Free Thinker.