Nobody expects the spanish plonk squad!

The short version: because failing to respond displays an outright absence of professionalism regardless of supposed degrees of experience. Every reader can confirm the former with his/her own eyes, whereas the other is a matter of taking someone's word for it.

The long version: assuming that it's at all possible, the anti-systemd concerns can be answered with a reference to a FAQ document where previous answers are listed. If those concerns aren't in the FAQ, an answer should be written and then added to the FAQ. Doing this would take as much time and effort as answering someone who isn't supposedly a nobody, and makes the pro-systemd position more solid. If it isn't possible to answer a particular anti-systemd concern, then there must be a proper argument for why that is so. The definition of proper argument excludes Mr. Pöttering's "systemd myths" page, his "claim to sacred victimhood" G+ posting, and various journalistic threat narratives concerning the Devuan (nee debianfork.org) project.

This'd move the argument into one of dueling FAQs, so I'll jump the gun on the next salvo with this <URL:http://judecnelson.blogspot.fi/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fa...> list of fallacious pro-systemd arguments and the counterarguments demonstrating them as such. Note that the document was first posted in September 2014 which makes it two months old at this time.

However instead of a civilized discussion we've seen various forms of playing to the crowd, ad-hominems, discussion-stoppers, and outright playground-style sneering. "Neener-neener, aren't you just a butt-hurt neck-beard troll! Ban his stupid ass. I'm being victimized by white males in their 30s and 40s, and I'm not going to engage in any further discussion about this post. lololo." On the pro-systemd end there are people, even Debian developers, who'd rather be publicly seen throwing their toys out of the pram than engage criticism at a level that excludes dogma.

It's my sincere opinion that this discussion must move forward regardless of the non-arguments in their various forms that we've seen so far, and especially despite the "this matter has been decided, please disperse, move along nothing to see here, go back to your homes" theme of article seen in e.g. the LWN headline two weeks ago. As it stands right now the discussion is lagging the impact of systemd and its tentacles by about three years: even commenters on a cutting-edge Linux news site such as this right here will rehash "just an init system", "socket activation makes it worthwhile on its own", "modular architecture means it isn't monolithic", and other demonstrably ill-founded quips.

I'm not one to put my faith in credibility games; they only exist to make perceived truth conform to the best player's ideology and not to empirically verifiable reality and logically equivalent derivatives therefrom. However, when open source luminaries such as Bruce Perens are getting on systemd's ass about not just technology but also communication, then it's certainly time to stop, take a deep breath, and consider just what the hell's going on outside of the pre-chewed conclusions which the pro-systemd camp is offering.