Re: Wayland or X11, was: Re: Upcoming time boundary events

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:35:28 +0100, chrisq wrote:
 

Looks political, in the same way that I saw systemd as a power grab by
RedHat.

 
The number one rule for any good conspiracy theory: “Cui bono?” aka “Who
benefits?”, aka “Follow the money”.
 
What kind of business model is it for Red Hat to force competitors into
using its products for free? Even assuming it has the kind of market
muscle to achieve that, which it doesn’t.

You pretend that you do not understand how it works.  Red Hat has
its customers and to maximize profits wants control of what is
included in Linux.  Systemd is very intrusive, require changes to
a lot of programs.  Trying to keep systemd as a proprietary add-on
would mean much more effort on part of Red Hat.  Worse, Red Hat
would risk that comunity develops something better, which
gives comparable benefits with less drawback.

More generally, since components of a Linux distribution are
open source, anybody can start a new Linux distribution.
Red Hat clearly want some barries of entry for potential
competitors.  Copyright gives a weak barrier because only
some add-ons are proprietary and rest is open source.
But system complexity is quite an effective barrier,
small player can not effectively manage developement
of complex enough system (in fact, even for proprietery
systems complexity is main barrier: if something is known
and simple enough, then small competitor can code a
replacement).  So Red Hat proprietary interest promotes
complexity, at least as long as complexity does not exceed
level that Red Hat can handle.

<conspiracy theory>
And concerning secret funding by Microsoft: Microsoft
realised that it can not stop adoption of Linux.
So the next best thing for them would be to control
Linux.  ATM they can not do this.  But if complexity
of Linux grows eventually it will reach level that
only Microsoft can manage.  And once Linux gets
that complex, it will implode or maybe Microsoft
will "rescue" it and take control.  OK, Google and
Apple that also can manage similar complexity, so
from Microsoft point of view implosion is probably
easier to archive.  Or that cut a deal with Google
for joint control.
</conspiracy theory>

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