Techrights

Decommodification is a Corporate Strategy Against Communities

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 14, 2025

2023: OpenBSD Founder Theo de Raadt Says Wayland is an Attack Software Choice and a Push Towards "Vertical Software Monocultures"

Chris Siebenmann (University of Toronto) has this new article, in which he describes the reasons many people "still use our old-fashioned Unix login servers". To quote: "We have two sorts of login servers. There's effectively one general purpose login server that people aren't supposed to do heavy duty computation on (and which uses per-user CPU and RAM limits to help with that), and four 'compute' login servers where they can go wild and use up all of the CPUs and memory they can get their hands on (with no guarantees that there will be any, those machines are basically first come, first served; for guaranteed CPUs and RAM people need to use our SLURM cluster). Usage of these servers has declined over time, but they still see a reasonable amount of use, including by people who have only recently joined the department (as graduate students or otherwise)."

Folks who oppose systemd also oppose elogind. As Wikipedia puts is, "Elogind is the systemd project's "logind", extracted to be a standalone daemon".

systemd is led by Microsoft and hosted by Microsoft. It basically seeks to replace UNIX-like modularity with an all-in-one 'solution' controlled by Microsoft.

Where does that lead? Well, "maybe a theme could be the fight against the decommodification strategy laid out in Microsoft's Halloween Documents," we are reminded, bearing in mind how those same documents also describe efforts to divide the community using politics. "As long as GNU/Linux systems remain commodities," argued an associate, "it is possible to offer flexible services like those Chris describes."

Seeing what Canonical has done to Ubuntu (same trajectory of outsourcing to Microsoft), there are good reasons to be worried. It's almost as if Canonical and others use Microsoft's Halloween Documents as an actual manual - a document or documents that help them attack the communities, replacing them with corporations, CoCs, and online bullies (the "good" bullies, the ones that serve those corporations). █