Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
&gt; In 2015, an unrelated tool called Kubernetes was released by Google (but, really, by Xooglers). I would go so far as to say that Kubernetes (or, as the &quot;cool kids&quot; say, k8s) is the worst thing to happen to system administration since systemd.<p>This, I think, is the key to understanding this whole rant. It is entirely of a piece with the anti-systemd crowd, and I think understanding what was really going on there helps explain this rant, and a lot of other agita in the community these days.<p>Like, if you followed the drama on the Debian mailing list, it could sometimes feel very surprising that they were willing to go to war over the least sexy thing ever, an init system. Part of the reply is that systemd is more than that, it&#x27;s a bunch of low-level plumbing all lashed together. But, who cares about low-level plumbing that much?<p>The answer (other than &#x27;the exact sort of people who run Debian&#x27;) is this. Linux started off as being written by hobbyists, for each other. It was very often a labor of love. Even the people making money off it weren&#x27;t doing so in Big Business sort of ways. Linux and the associated stack around it is being taken over by a lot of big corporate interests: Intel, Red Hat, Google, even Microsoft. Are they bad? That&#x27;s a matter of opinion. Are they inept technically? Probably not, but a lot of it revolves around how you measure things.<p>But what is absolutely happening is that people who are paid to maintain these projects on the behalf of large corporate interests are more plentiful, both in headcount and in personhours, than people who are maintaining these things for each other. For people who were used to Linux as this anti-corporate space, that&#x27;s a huge and distressing change. And they can feel powerless against it, because it&#x27;s really hard to reach a critical mass of people who feel the same way as you, and are willing to do all the things to not just support a fork but to keep the rest of the ecosystem they live in open to the fork.<p>It&#x27;s not about any one piece of software, and it&#x27;s not _really_ about pure technical merit. It&#x27;s about the culture and the system of values and the way that decisions are made and it&#x27;s about who&#x27;s in control. The author&#x27;s complaint isn&#x27;t so much that the Google style is bad (although I&#x27;m sure he believes that very strongly), but that it&#x27;s harder and harder to find somewhere to escape its reach.