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

On Sat, 21 Jun 2025 01:25:59 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:

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

>
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.

I know full well how it works. I make my livelihood from Open Source.

Red Hat has its customers and to maximize profits wants control of
what is included in Linux.

Systemd myth number 27: systemd is a Red-Hat-only project, is private
property of some smart-ass developers, who use it to push their views
to the world.

<https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html>

Red Hat only has control over its own distro. It’s not even the most
popular distro. Look at the 300-odd products listed on DistroWatch,
for example, and you will find more offshoots of Debian than of Red
Hat.

Systemd is very intrusive, require changes to a lot of programs.

Remember, it’s primarily a service manager. It doesn’t require changes
to the programs actually implementing those services (though there are
some features it offers that can make that easier). In fact, for a
long time it did a better job of providing backward compatibility with
those legacy-style boilerplate-ridden sysvinit scripts than some other
service manager alternatives.

Trying to keep systemd as a proprietary add-on would mean much more
effort on part of Red Hat.

Also difficult, since contributions to systemd come from
other sources besides Red Hat.

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.

systemd does not do that. It, too, is fully open source, after all.
It’s a component you can choose to include, or not, when creating your
own distro.

<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.

Given that systemd is not actually any part of Linux -- it’s a purely
userland thing -- it’s not clear how encouraging that would lead to
such an outcome. Could you clarify how this is supposed to happen?