Lennart Poettering On The Open-Source Community: A Sick Place To Be In

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lennart Poettering On The Open-Source Community: A Sick Place To Be In

Lennart Poettering made some interesting remarks today via his personal Google+ page about how the open-source community can be "quite a sick place to be in" with its controversies and personal attacks...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgwNTk

[Veske]

Most of the hate seems to come from 4chan.org/g, people there have some sort of ancient wrath against him. Also the systemd boycott came from there.

[89c51]

For someone with the balls to take on and hack on big problems in the FOSS stack Lennart comes out as a bit of a pussy with this.

He practically won no matter what every idiotic weirdbeard "hacker" has to say about him and/or his software. Pulseaudio is used by nearly everyone and the same goes for systemd. And i believe the same will happen with his plan on fixing the software installation problem (packaged ). He delivered all the other idiots didn't.

As for torvalds he is what he is. And thats fine. And BTW in Debcon he spoke fondly of systemd. His only gripe was the handling of bugs.

[schmidtbag]

People like Linus because he literally and figuratively gives the finger to professionalism and everything that relies on it (like capitalism or propriety). Throughout history, everyone always liked the one who stood up to greed and power. He says some pretty horrible things but I don't think he actually has that much hate toward his subjects; I think he's just being "colorful" and funny, and I'm pretty sure other developers feel the same way or else they'd quit after being singled-out like that.

As for Poettering, he wouldn't have so much hate if he'd actually listen to people. The nice thing about open source is you can do things however you want, but if people decide to switch to your product, they switched because they liked it as it was and are only seeking improvements. In a case like systemd, adding new features isn't exactly correlated to improvements. Ubuntu/Canonical has had the same problem - they created something everyone liked and suddenly they start completely changing their course whether their customer based likes it or not. I'm sure I'd still use Ubuntu if they didn't keep deciding how to run my system. Linus is kind of an asshole but people like him because his decisions are for the best of everyone, not his own personal agenda. Linus doesn't like how much bloat is being added and is very often right about his choices. Poettering, while not necessarily wrong, has bad priorities.

[nox86]

Psssssssssssss

[clementl]

People like Linus because he literally and figuratively gives the finger to professionalism and everything that relies on it (like capitalism or propriety). Throughout history, everyone always liked the one who stood up to greed and power. He says some pretty horrible things but I don't think he actually has that much hate toward his subjects; I think he's just being "colorful" and funny, and I'm pretty sure other developers feel the same way or else they'd quit after being singled-out like that.

As for Poettering, he wouldn't have so much hate if he'd actually listen to people. The nice thing about open source is you can do things however you want, but if people decide to switch to your product, they switched because they liked it as it was and are only seeking improvements. In a case like systemd, adding new features isn't exactly correlated to improvements. Ubuntu/Canonical has had the same problem - they created something everyone liked and suddenly they start completely changing their course whether their customer based likes it or not. I'm sure I'd still use Ubuntu if they didn't keep deciding how to run my system. Linus is kind of an asshole but people like him because his decisions are for the best of everyone, not his own personal agenda. Linus doesn't like how much bloat is being added and is very often right about his choices. Poettering, while not necessarily wrong, has bad priorities.

Nonetheless, the amount of hate that's been spread is totally uncalled for. Any kind of such words in real life would get people arrested for hate speech.

[oleid]

Collecting money to hire a hitman is sick. And most certainly criminal. Claiming that Lennard provoced it is like claiming a woman provoced a rape, because she dressed too sexy.

[bibaheu]

If I were Lennart I would advertise myself as a "Hitman specialized on Open Source developers". I would ask for money, and then with the coins I would buy a car with a "systemd" licence plate.
So much /g tears

[Naib]

If you act like an asshole don't get all precious when people act like dicks to you. Watch, this is not how you interact with a presenter, especially going out of your way to cut him off

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

[stevenc]

systemd has been developing in a way inconsiderate of established GNU/Linux practices, he's done very his own thing but at the inconvenience of others. Now he seems to even have political disagreements with its developers. So, why the hell not fork his own project, a kernel and/or distribution based around systemd, with all his own people involved in it?