> When has Linux ever been beholden to an independent standards body?
It hasn't needed to be because nobody's tried to replace so much of userspace with such a tightly integrated set of programs before, and we've not had programs and services assume that such a mess is being used before.
> Linux has only adhered to standards where the standards are actually useful.
I would argue that at the point that a number of programs start to depend on complex functionality, where the API is defined by a grand total of one project, some form of standardisation is required.
Otherwise, it is nearly impossible for others to reimplement the API correctly, meaning that we will never have meaningful competition within this space without breaking half the services anyone runs. That is not a good thing.
Before systemd, I could replace any component of my system independently, and everything would keep working. To a very significant extent, I could even replace my kernel with a BSD, recompile everything, and it all keeps on working! Now, I can no longer do that, because of a variety of packages which have hard dependencies on systemd where previously they worked fine without it.
It hasn't needed to be because nobody's tried to replace so much of userspace with such a tightly integrated set of programs before, and we've not had programs and services assume that such a mess is being used before.
> Linux has only adhered to standards where the standards are actually useful.
I would argue that at the point that a number of programs start to depend on complex functionality, where the API is defined by a grand total of one project, some form of standardisation is required.
Otherwise, it is nearly impossible for others to reimplement the API correctly, meaning that we will never have meaningful competition within this space without breaking half the services anyone runs. That is not a good thing.
Before systemd, I could replace any component of my system independently, and everything would keep working. To a very significant extent, I could even replace my kernel with a BSD, recompile everything, and it all keeps on working! Now, I can no longer do that, because of a variety of packages which have hard dependencies on systemd where previously they worked fine without it.