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

[Naib]

Uh, when did datenwolf cut Lennart off?
Or did you mean Lennart was the asshole here?
Not the guy who is to proud to give his bloody talk in German because his English is so "good" (yeah, listen to the talk and the organisers even begged that everyone who is not as well trained in English to just keep their talk in German if they are native Germans), tells Lennart that he is okay if Lennart interrupts him and then is pissed that he does and best of all, blaming Lennart for the FUD datenwold spreads because "you know, you could have all told me this before?". Are you kidding me? If the guy had given this talk at my university, our Professor would have thrown him out before he could have even finished that sentence.
And he gives this talk at the freaking biggest European hacker conference? And then expects that people who he is just shitting on in his talk will sit there and take it without asking him questions or correcting his mistakes? It is his bloody job to make sure his talk is correct and if it is not, it is his fault and nobody elses.

Even with out Lennart it would have been an extremely bad talk. Which is not to say that datenwolf is stupid or incapability to do good talks.
If you read his blog, you will find some nice texts and ideas. Personally, judging from his blog, I think he often does not get the idea behind evolution instead of revolution (see for example his case against wayland: http://datenwolf.net/bl20110930-0001/) so to him a lot of functionality is useless while it is just a stepping stone for others to do something greater. But as I said, I only know his blog and his talk.

I never said Datenwolf cut up Lennart, It was Lennart that is being an asshole (come on... read the topic and follow the thread). Lennart has been an asshole time and time again, why is he surprised the linux community is then a dick back.

Datenwolf was giving a presentation, maybe aspects of what he was presenting was wrong BUT it was his presentation NOT a discussion. Lennart repeatedly interrupted him (completely putting him off while he was presenting). He then repeatedly did one of the biggest ass things you could do...
Datenwolf makes a statement
Lennart butts in and talks down to him
Lennart finishes
Datenwolf goes to start again
Lennart IMMEDIATLY interupts him and knocks him down again.

If Lennart went to any of the conferences I regularly goto and pulled that shit he would have been told to not interrupt and if he did it again he would have been escorted out. This fucker is an asshole and there is only one way to deal with an asshole and that is find a dick to fuck him OTHERWISE we all get covered in shit!

Ignoring the fact, that the speaker not really knows, what he is talking about... Sure, Lennard should have been more polite. During this talk and on other occasions. He doesn't deny it in his posting. But there is a big difference between not being polite and threatening to kill somebody. Lennard really has a point here. This needs to be addressed. And a lot of people in this very forum should feel addressed.

NO Lennard was an asshole at that presentation (and other examples of him being an asshole, not respecting anyone elses view but his own...)

And as to the so called "deaththreat"...

He got precious over a 2line jovial irc comment that ppl should pool bitcoins to get a hitman...
This fucker is a narcissist

<kerio> how expensive is a hitman?
<kerio> we can pool some bitcoins

http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.txt

That is not the Linux community wanting to hire a hitman OR even hiring one...


^^ read above.

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.

I hope the Bundesnachrichtendienst and FBI hunts down the assbag who put up the hit even if it was just a joke you fucking terrorist

[chrisb]

I don't think one should hide behind "it was just a joke" excuse after such a over the top response especially coming from Linus in a public mailing list. He is in position of authority and his actions and tone gets emulated in LKML quite often. It makes the entire atmosphere rather poisonous. This has been an ongoing topic even in the kernel summit for a number of years and for good reason. I recommend reading these two:

https://lwn.net/Articles/249104/

https://lwn.net/Articles/559061/

Yes, more misinterpretations:

Greg, the reason you get a lot of stable patches seems to be that you make it easy to act as a door-mat. Clearly at least some people say "I know this patch isn't important enough to send to Linus, but I know Greg will silently accept it after the fact, so I'll just wait and mark it for stable".

You may need to learn to shout at people.

Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence... Not *fucking* cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable.

There may be some point to the argument that Linus, like the rest of us, should be careful about what he says, but it is hard to take someone seriously when they misunderstand his communications so badly. In that exchange, Linus is clearly encouraging Greg to be more proactive in rejecting poor quality patches. He does not mean that Greg should be literally shouting and using physical intimidation and violence towards other developers. Do people really believe that Linus advocates violence and physical abuse for managing development? Or are they just deliberately misunderstanding, so that they can take cheap pot shots at him? Linus's statement was not meant to be literal.

Also, as an aside, it is odd that someone calling on others to "Keep it professional on the mailing lists" did so in such an unprofessional way by being abusive and using the F word; a professional should know better than to swear on a public mailing list.

[mo0n_sniper]

That's kind of the center of most criticism -- that systemd and the systemd way
of doing things "infects" a lot of unrelated packages, i.e. even if you don't like
systemd, all your other options are slowly being taken away because some package/daemon
you might like suddenly depends on systemd. (see udev for example).

I disagree and here is my point:
If the developers that work on that package/daemon prefer systemd and they spend their free time writing code that works with systemd how can you complain?
Users of software often complain but they don't spend time writing that software. It's not really your software.

The problem with udev, from what I recall, is that no one wanted to maintain udev anymore, so Lennart and all said they will incorporate udev in systemd and maintain it.
You can force Lennart to support your distribution, if he ony wants to work for systemd it's he's time and his choice.

I had high hopes for systemd too -- I liked the idea of a collection of daemons that
worked together via standardized interfaces and could be administered through simple
text UIs. However it has evolved into a gargantuan kitchensink-kit with no real benefit
(other than very fast bootup, which is kind of a secondary point for servers) and
crap to nonexistant documentation
.........

I find that systemd is very well documented. The documentation at FreeDesktop covers all parts of systemd in my opinion.
Also as a system admin systemd fixes some annoying problems for me: resolving the server IP to the hostaname, automatically restarting proceses, journald is very good for filtering logs and many more.
Of course there are some problems but I think they can be fixed along the way.

[FireBurn]

I think a point a lot of people are missing is verbal abuse is still abuse. It should not be excused or worse blamed on the victim

[Luke_Wolf]

Well, the reason that Lennart gets it where Torvalds and Theo don't, is that while they're all assholes, Torvalds goes out of his way to ensure that people don't break stuff, and Theo takes other people's broken stuff, cleans it up and gives us a clean fixed version. Meanwhile Lennart makes all sorts of disruptive changes, this isn't a value statement on whether the changes are good or bad, but that he causes all sorts of changes in how people interact with their systems which naturally ruffles a lot of feathers, it doesn't help that early versions of his software are often buggy and can cause bad interactions which break things (see pulse exposing all sorts of ALSA bugs).

[chrisb]

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.

There is a big difference between trolls saying that they are collecting money to pay a hitman, and people who are seriously plotting to have a person murdered. My guess would be that the former is what happened here, and that there is no real plot to kill Lennart.

Having said that, making a threat to kill someone is still a crime, so has Lennart reported them to the police? Unless the offenders took steps to remain anonymous, it ought to be a pretty trivial matter for their ISP to identify them so they can be jailed.

[FireBurn]

Well, the reason that Lennart gets it where Torvalds and Theo don't, is that while they're all assholes, Torvalds goes out of his way to ensure that people don't break stuff, and Theo takes other people's broken stuff, cleans it up and gives us a clean fixed version. Meanwhile Lennart makes all sorts of disruptive changes, this isn't a value statement on whether the changes are good or bad, but that he causes all sorts of changes in how people interact with their systems which naturally ruffles a lot of feathers, it doesn't help that early versions of his software are often buggy and can cause bad interactions which break things (see pulse exposing all sorts of ALSA bugs).

I'm not denying there's a learning curve to systemd. It does however only need to be learned once to cover all the major distros which are now using it. Previously you had to learn each distros nuances.

By your logic we should all be hating Wayland as it's making huge disruptive changes requiring all toolkits and a lot of apps to be rewritten to support it

[sbolokanov]

People that are against Lennart or systemD act exactly like little spoiled brats.
If you don't like systemD then don't use it. No one is forcing you to.
You are using something for free, no one has to make you happy in particular.

They ARE forcing them. I can certainly see why they whine about it.

[Luke_Wolf]

I'm not denying there's a learning curve to systemd. It does however only need to be learned once to cover all the major distros which are now using it. Previously you had to learn each distros nuances.

By your logic we should all be hating Wayland as it's making huge disruptive changes requiring all toolkits and a lot of apps to be rewritten to support it

Please go read through this very forum on wayland threads from a few years ago, it was very much a thing before everyone got used to the idea outside of a few stragglers, like johnc.

[mo0n_sniper]

They ARE forcing them. I can certainly see why they whine about it.

Not exactly.
If your current distribution is using systemd by default, you can remove it and install an other init software (systemV or whatever..). Or you can switch distribution.
The packagers that do the hard work choose systemd as default as their choice, you as an user can install other software.