I've been asked by a couple of people for my thoughts on how the upstart CLA has impacted my position about the default init system for Debian. I think it's pretty clear the upstart CLA was the most damaging at the very start of the project. As Kay and Lennart have intimated elsewhere, the upstart CLA was a very real and important reason for the genesis of systemd as a separate project instead of a series of improvements for upstart. Without the upstart CLA, there would be no systemd, and we would not be discussing which init system to switch to as we would have all switched to upstart a long time ago. If the upstart CLA were to disappear today, then future collaboration would be dramatically eased, and upstart would become a full member of the free software ecosystem. However, we cannot go back and fix the damage caused by the CLA at the start of the project. Most of the larger community has been working hard on systemd since it started and it has made enormous progress. Upstart has been improving as well, but at a slower pace commensurate with developer effort. In my analysis of the proposed replacements as a member of the tech-ctte, I tried to ignore the political issues (including the CLA) and focus purely on technical merits of the proposals. What I found was that both upstart and systemd were a huge improvement over our existing init system, and that either would be a good move for the Debian project on Linux. However, on balance, I believe that systemd is a better replacement for sysvinit than upstart for the majority of Debian uses today. -- keith.packard@intel.com
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