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

[asdfblah]

So, Poettering (and some people in this thread) never was told to "read the fucking manual" when asking for help? He's supposed to be improving Linux, right? How new is he? Does he even use Linux?

Regarding the violence itself: it's true, it's not an excuse to be violent, but it's also true that people shouldn't be taking things in the literal sense, and should take context into account... you know the old meme, "internet is serious business", right? Also, I wouldn't expect Linus himself to change. It's his project, it's the way he's been doing things and other devs know that. And if Linux gets overtaken, people WILL leave.

Regarding Poettering himself: we all know, from personal experience, the quality of his software, and how his defenders act. Again, not a surprise, nothing of this stuff.

Personally, I just hope GNOME and systemd die. GNOME (and everything related to it) has harmed Linux too much, IMO. Obviously, it won't happen anytime soon...

[RahulSundaram]

Regarding the violence itself: it's true, it's not an excuse to be violent, but it's also true that people shouldn't be taking things in the literal sense, and should take context into account...

Ok. Let's talk about context.

"Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!)"

How does context help here? How is this not literal?

[Dukenukemx]

Whatever, you're a sick place to be in. Michael's reviews are wrong and missing things I'm going to talk about. Read a book.

But no seriously it is a very hostile place to be in. It's not just the people that visit the forums, but the moderators as well. I think Ubuntu forums actually has the least hostile moderators I've dealt with so far.

[Luke]

Death threats over coding disputes is REALLY out of line

You are twisting words quite a bit. Poettering isn't saying "User's Hate Change". He's saying he's getting death threats, people are raising money to kill him, posting about the best ways to kill him, etc... Pretty horrendous behavior.

Assuming the threats are not motivated by accusations of NSA or personal spyware being believed, this is about as out of line as it gets. I've seen some hairy shit in my time, almost got killed when a protest I was in was ambushed by police, and I can tell you this: armed force and violence are not jokes, they should be reserved for very serious matters indeed, far beyond disputes about whether or not systemd or pulseaudio are good for your computer's usability.

If anyone is really raising money to kill Poettering. that is solicitation to commit murder and none of us should tolerate it. I would personally fight to defend him or anyone else in this community facing that kind of bullying if it came to it.

[ParticleBoard]

As a Gentoo user I know that gentoo devs have been fighting the good fight against the great satan systemd. They forked udev into eudev but as of recently (or so I have read) udev has been gobbled up by systemd so that makes it harder to port any patches to eudev now. Now I didn't understand the hatred that people had for systemd... until I started administering some RHEL7 servers.

Systemd invokes and anger in me I can't even describe. I started using linux about 20 years ago and I can honestly say this is one of the most utterly maddening pieces of software I have ever used. The complex if not bizarre web of config files, dependencies, moving target documentation that never seems to be correct or up to date. Maybe it's just RHEL as even Arch seems to handle systemd more sanely but I dunno. The way it does log files with journald, the folding in of a qr code reader and webserver into an init process (lol).

I'm calling it right now. As systemd spreads more and more I'm betting with the monstrous number of includes and functionality it has this is going to be a security nightmare if not a stability nightmare once the lead devs abandon it down the road.

[interested]

...Now I didn't understand the hatred that people had for systemd... until I started administering some RHEL7 servers.
Systemd invokes and anger in me I can't even describe.

systemd have been in distros since 2011 and that RHEL would be using it have been known for almost as long. But a lot of people, you inclusive, seems to have totally ignored to actually study how it works. There are +100 man pages and many design and deployment pages to be read to even get a basic grip about how it functions if you have no launchd/SMF experience or no experience with cgroups, kernel capabilities etc.

Being a cowboy admin, trying to learn what amounts to a new OS, just by trying it out on production servers are going to be frustrating and painful.

There will be a lot of griping about RHEL7 and CentOS7 from people who are unprepared for the task of dealing with systemd, and then tries to blame systemd for all the troubles they have. People blaming the new tech to cover up for their lack of hard knowledge is predictable. Many years of Linux SA experience is no substitute for actually studying systemd in detail and have hands-on experience with its tools, before dealing with production servers.

[geearf]

I am truly shocked by this, I knew a lot of people "hated" Lennart before but this...
I use most of his projects and I am fine with them.
On the other hand I am happy to see projects built to replace systemd, I think competition is always a healthy thing.
In the same way, I have no problem with people "hating" PA or SD, but hiring a hitman or some other stuff?
Now that's just going way too far... I am not sure why he continues to code for us with behaviors like these.

[WorBlux]

As a Gentoo user I know that gentoo devs have been fighting the good fight against the great satan systemd. They forked udev into eudev but as of recently (or so I have read) udev has been gobbled up by systemd so that makes it harder to port any patches to eudev now. Now I didn't understand the hatred that people had for systemd... until I started administering some RHEL7 servers.

Systemd invokes and anger in me I can't even describe. I started using linux about 20 years ago and I can honestly say this is one of the most utterly maddening pieces of software I have ever used. The complex if not bizarre web of config files, dependencies, moving target documentation that never seems to be correct or up to date. Maybe it's just RHEL as even Arch seems to handle systemd more sanely but I dunno. The way it does log files with journald, the folding in of a qr code reader and webserver into an init process (lol).

I'm calling it right now. As systemd spreads more and more I'm betting with the monstrous number of includes and functionality it has this is going to be a security nightmare if not a stability nightmare once the lead devs abandon it down the road.

Personally I think SystemD is a very good direction for Linux.

I support system integration 100%. I dont want 20 different tools from 20 different groups...I'm sorry but SystemD is a good thing.
And the fact that it is so prevalent now points out that most people feel the same way.

For Linux to move forward a lot of things that were adhock have to be standardized.

SystemD is just the 21st tool. Some standardation was useful, take LSB as a good example.

Having truely modular tools give you choice, freedom, and flexibility. SystemD is making it a real pain to maintain said choice, freedom, and flexibility as is the gentoo way. Not everybody needs or wants the "standard fare" and mucking everything up together creates problems and makes it harder to share ideas and code with other OS's. Some of the ideas and capabilities of systemD (PID1) are really cool and useful. Trying to crowd in everything else as well may be overreach. Why create thier own network manager rather than patch the existing ones to work with the unique features of systemD?

[Delgarde]

Some people clearly have anger-management issues...

[halo9en]

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.

"He's saying he's getting death threats, people are raising money to kill him, posting about the best ways to kill him, etc."

Meh, I hate to agree with Poettering but if the source is 4chan then he's right: sociopaths and psycopaths at their best, a pretty fucked up community.