Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 25, 2026 21:14 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Yay for Clang by jmalcolm
Parent article: GNU C Library 2.43 released

> To be fair, I should probably be saying Red Hat Linux Platfrom instead of GNU as Red Hat controls all the parts of GNU that anybody cares about and some of my complaints are with Red Hat software outside of the GNU Project like Systemd.

Except, as I understand it, systemd is not (and never has been) Red Hat software ... okay, they were one of the first adopters, but that's not to say it's their software ...

> It is simply my view that what Red Hat sees as "Linux" tends to dominate what becomes standard in other distoros as well and that Red Hat is unconcerned or even hostile to interoperability outside their platform.

Well, they ARE the big fish in the pond. I don't like it (or Red Hat distros), but if you're the local Great White, why should you care about the small fry around you?

Cheers,
Wol

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Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 8:32 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (1 responses)

> systemd is not (and never has been) Red Hat software

To quote the "History" section on the systemd Wikipedia page: "Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,"

Lennart built systemd on Fedora and first released it to the world on a Fedora 13 QEMU image. I think Fedora was the first distro to adopt it. Fedora being the place that future Red Hat engineering appears first.

But it is not even important to my point that Red Hat invented systemd. My point is that, once they adopt it into their platform, they work to make it essential by making sure that the rest of the system relies on it.

> if you're the local Great White, why should you care about the small fry around you?

I cannot argue with that and it was not actually my intention to. I do not use Red Hat distros but I do enjoy a lot of the software that they create and or contribute to. And I do see the value in a standard Linux platform as the default.

Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 9:41 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

To quote the "History" section on the systemd Wikipedia page: "Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,"

Like many prominent Linux developers, Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers “worked for” Red Hat in the sense that Red Hat was paying them a stipend to enable them to do whatever it was that they would be doing anyway. It's not as if their boss called them into his office one morning and told them to write systemd.

Also, systemd became popular not merely because Red Hat pushed it once it was there, but because most other mainstream distributions, too, quickly realised that it was a huge improvement on the status quo (including Upstart, which had run into limitations of its design). At that point, Linux was the only Unix-like system that still relied on the System-V init approach from the 1980s; all commercial Unixes had already moved on to newer infrastructure that was more like systemd than it was like System-V init, and it was fairly clear that something new and more suitable for the 21st century was needed on the Linux side, too.