Podman winning is good. Red Hat consistently does things right, for example their quay.io is open source, unlike Docker Hub and GitHub Container Registry. The risks of not using rootless containers weren’t blown way out of proportion, because rootless containers really are much more secure. Not requiring a daemon, supporting cgroup v2 early, supporting rootless containers well and having them as the default, these are all good engineering decisions with big benefits for the users. In this and many other things, Red Hat eventually wins because they are more open-source friendly and because they hire better developers who make better engineering decisions.
> In this and many other things, Red Hat eventually wins because they are more open-source friendly and because they hire better developers who make better engineering decisions.
We must be talking about a different Red Hat here. Podman, with breaking changes in every version, that is supposedly feature and CLI complete with Docker, but isn't actually, is winning because it's more open source friendly or better technically? Or systemd, written in a memory unsafe language (yes, that is a problem for something so critical and was already exploited at least a couple of times), using a weird special format for it's configuration, where the lead dev insults people and refuses to backport patches (no, updating systemd isn't a good idea) won "because it was more open source friendly"? Or OpenShift that tries to supplant Kubernetes stuff with Red Hat specific stuff that doesn't work in some cases (e.g. TCP IngressRoutes lack many features), is winning "because it was more open source friendly"?
No, Red Hat are just good at marketing, are an established name, and know how to push their products/projects well, even if they're not good or even ready (Podman is barely ready but has been pushed for years by this point).
>Or systemd, written in a memory unsafe language (yes, that is a problem for something so critical and was already exploited at least a couple of times)
What memory safe language 1) existed in 2010 and 2) is thoroughly portable to every architecture people commonly run Linux on and 3) is suitable for software as low-level as the init?
Rust is an option now but it wasn't back then. And Rust is being evaluated now, even though it's not quite ready yet on #2.
Go, although with it's GC it's debatable to what extent it's suitable for very low level software.
And honestly the language choice was only the tip of the iceberg, it took years of people adapting before systemd became usable. And it still doesn't handle circular dependencies better than arbitrarily which is ridiculous, literally one of it's main jobs is to handle dependencies.
