Ian Jackson Resigns From The Debian Technical Committee

[wizard69]

The minority view is important for civil rights, in software not so much.

It isn't even important for civil rights. The important thing is to keep the machine working, excessive focus on ones personal views will cause the machine to grind to a halt.

[danwood76]

Protection against what? 99% of the important data and programs of a user on a personal computer are run by that very user.
Does root protects you against a keylogger? a cryptolocker? a browser exploit?
User protection is achieve by sandboxing applications, and restricting access to user data between applications.

Oh, and did you know you can have administrator and non-administrator accounts and multiple users in Windows and its actually-not-so-many security holes?

As a system administrator for many systems the Linux based desktops and servers I manage need far less maintenance than their windows counterparts. The user system stops users from screwing the actual operating system up and ruining other peoples data. In web servers this seperation is crucial and allows tracking where the attacker got in and what they have done (something that is near impossible on Windows even with their fake multiuser system).

Secondly you can never really protect users from their own stupidity, yes there will be software bugs in browsers that would be attackers could exploit but thanks to systems like AppArmor the attack surface is usually greatly reduced.

Its worth noting on windows that their user system is not a true multi user system (it never has been). It is very easy for a user to elevate their privileges and modify system files (especially as microsoft has trained their users to click OK on all popups, an example of user stupidity again admittedly).

[wizard69]

That is the truth!!

Err no!

There are a lot of guys out there without respect for , the legacy left by those who fight in the past, to create the biggest distribution OS today, and that is a shame!!

If you are being an ass today what you did in the past means nothing.

This guys should never get into Debian in first place, because they never fulfill( and they never will ), the values of Debian culture!!

I'm not sure what you are saying here. However the TC considered the options and voted for the smart choice. That is exactly what you expect fron Debian.

[MoonMoon]

So you need to talk with the Debian guys...Debian OS not Gnome OS...

Because of him, a lot of software is depending on systemd...which stole us hour freedom...and turnout to be almost impossible, if not impossible at all, to ignore him in Debian OS...

so if you don't wan't systemd...you will be forced to jump out of Debian OS...

Nonsense! There is nothing stolen from you. All that you had was the right to use Debian as it was delivered to you by Debian developers and you still have that right. You are not at all entitled to tell them how they should work, which software should be in the repositories and which dependencies that software should be compiled with. If you are unhappy with their decisions then move your ass and either become a Debian developer (contributing to sysvinit compatibility), fork it (or create a sysvinit derivate) or move to a different distribution.

Do something instead of whining on forums how the developers stole you something that they delivered for free to you in the first place!
I am so fed up with you whiners. You want sysvinit compatibility in Debian? Then fucking start maintaining init scripts and send patches to the developers where necessary. Set up a repository with alternative packages, compiled without systemd support, if necessary. But stop demanding things as if you were a paying customer!

[gilboa]

Do something instead of whining on forums how the developers stole you something that they delivered for free to you in the first place!
I am so fed up with you whiners. You want sysvinit compatibility in Debian? Then fucking start maintaining init scripts and send patches to the developers where necessary. Set up a repository with alternative packages, compiled without systemd support, if necessary. But stop demanding things as if you were a paying customer!

In a very similar argument, a couple of weeks ago, I tried to explained to yet-another vocal I'm-entitled-to-everything-for-free anti-systemd campaigner that:
A. Open source is not a Democracy, but a Meritocracy - read: The people that actually sit in front of the keyword and write, err, code (as opposed to blasting the forums with "their opinion") get the to make the decision.
B. In the Open source world, the user is entitled to one thing, and one thing only - the source code. Everything else is optional.
C. The Debian TC decision is irreverent is one respect - if most big upstream project switch to systemd dependencies, Debian as a down stream project can either A. fork all the major project (I doubt they have the man power to do so) B, switch to systemd, C. maintain the pre-systemd tree in a bugfix only mode.

Needless to say, my argument fell on deaf ears.

[Skrapion]

The irony to the whole "systemd is taking away our freedom" argument is that for years, GNU was king userland. But between systemd and LLVM, GNU has lost their monopoly on userspace. Yet somehow, more alternatives from more groups counts as less freedom?

[erendorn]

As a system administrator for many systems the Linux based desktops and servers I manage need far less maintenance than their windows counterparts. The user system stops users from screwing the actual operating system up and ruining other peoples data. In web servers this seperation is crucial and allows tracking where the attacker got in and what they have done (something that is near impossible on Windows even with their fake multiuser system).

Secondly you can never really protect users from their own stupidity, yes there will be software bugs in browsers that would be attackers could exploit but thanks to systems like AppArmor the attack surface is usually greatly reduced.

Its worth noting on windows that their user system is not a true multi user system (it never has been). It is very easy for a user to elevate their privileges and modify system files (especially as microsoft has trained their users to click OK on all popups, an example of user stupidity again admittedly).

I cannot speak for servers (this discussion was started specifically about uid based protection on personal computers), but on PCs, windows does exactly the same thing and a bit more (there are also administrator accounts, there is user based files access and security policies, although you can set several groups and several users on a given file/policy, which is a bot more flexible).

Yes apparmor is a good method to protect user data (again, the discussion was whether uid based protection was adequate for that; it's not).

I'd like to know how is windows not a multi user system. Privilege escalation is absolutely not as easy as you make it seems (and not systematically worse than on unix, where priv escalation are observed as well. bugs happen).

Windows 98 was a long time ago.

[Michael_S]

The irony to the whole "systemd is taking away our freedom" argument is that for years, GNU was king userland. But between systemd and LLVM, GNU has lost their monopoly on userspace. Yet somehow, more alternatives from more groups counts as less freedom?

And of course systemd is LGPL(v2.1+) so the people who dislike it could even fork it and strip out or rewrite the pieces they don't want, and potentially convince upstream to take their changes and potentially keep borrowing features they do like from upstream.

[Baconmon]

Finally!.......

Thank our holy lord jesus he finally left.. He was trying to drive debian straight in to the ground.. I think there is now some hope back in debian's future now.. Thanks ian, for doing the right thing and ridding every one of your self..

[DeeK]

so if i don't install systemd i can't install GNOME, so GNOME die near soon!)
nice, i like it !

Don't celebrate too soon. There's a software package called systemd-shim, which should allow you to install systemd dependant software without actually installing systemd.

So, alas, Gnome will still work for all concerned.