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

[oneofone]

The amount of assbackward, living-in-the-90s-and-anti-anything-new clueless assholes in this thread is too damn high.

[chrisb]

he didn't say he supports it
he said there are some good ideas in it, and that other inits can do the same thing
same thing i said the first time

Saying that "Systemd does a lot of things right", that there are some good ideas in it, and praising the boot up speed, is a form of support. There are degrees of support - we are not talking about sports teams - it is possible for a software developer to make supportive statements like "Systemd does a lot of things right" without excluding other init systems.

[gens]

Saying that "Systemd does a lot of things right", that there are some good ideas in it, and praising the boot up speed, is a form of support. There are degrees of support - we are not talking about sports teams - it is possible for a software developer to make supportive statements like "Systemd does a lot of things right" without excluding other init systems.

by that it also implies that he supports upstart and openrc
so it's not just systemd, that the context leads to

[chrisb]

This blog post is not about systemd vs. the world, but about sick individuals in a community. Maybe he contacted the police and the people where caugt, still you can blog about it and use it as example for harmful excesses.

Lennart did not say that he has contacted the police, but he presented the "hitman" as though it were a serious threat to his life:

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

The person who made the threat has already been identified as a user called "kerio" from #maemo:

Feb 14 2013 18:21:51 <kerio> how expensive is a hitman?
Feb 14 2013 18:22:03 <kerio> we can pool some bitcoins

As I already said, making a threat to kill someone is illegal, so if Lennart believes the threat to be serious, then he should report it to the police. If he does not believe the threat to be serious, then he should not present it as if it is. And unless he has evidence to the contrary, he should not blame it on Linus Torvalds. It's a really tenuous (and perhaps slanderous) link to jump from "they hired a bitcoin hitman" -> "first and foremost I blame Linus Torvalds".

[BwackNinja]

No one gets anything out of denying the possibility that they could be wrong. If you don't go into a discussion open to the possibility of leaving with a different opinion, then you've got such an inflated ego you should really be more worried about people popping it. I'd be horribly disappointed if I ever felt there was nothing that I could learn from those around me. The problem with the systemd haters, the pulseaudio haters, and then even Lennart himself is that they've largely resigned themselves to only learning from their own echo-chambers. Don't get me wrong, no one deserves the kind of treatment that he's gotten, however even just listening to the voices in this forum, I can't deny that a lot of vocal members of the community can get angry really fast and that those individuals are largely not developers themselves. If that portion of the community is angered That being said, he knows how to anger that vocal minority. He's disrupted the status quo, told everyone that what they use is crap, and heads a project where it is at least unexpected and a great surprise that many of the components could possibly be useful to those who don't subscribe to the init system. Unfortunately it's all a feedback loop pushing both sides further and further from each other to the point where you almost wonder why it took so long for a post like this from Lennart to occur.

The difference between the disruption caused by a project like Wayland and by systemd is first who is heading it - with Wayland largely composed of X developers and the fact that it hasn't yet been thought of as a viable option in any major distribution, it sounds a lot more like an improvement done with care rather than a true revolution. Systemd on the other hand comes from Lennart who is not associated with any init system, and being associated with PulseAudio, makes one expect that systemd was pushed everywhere too early. Even the strongest supporters of PulseAudio will cite the mediocre initial packaging and problems lower in the stack for why it was received so poorly initially. It might've been ready enough by itself (for the most part at least), but people's audio drivers certainly weren't, so using it as the default for more than just testers was a bad move. In addition, systemd differentiates itself by being invasive and replacing rather than augmenting projects that depend on it. Gnome relies on it's interfaces, while GTK+ hasn't begun to rely on Wayland - it has pluggable backend support instead. That's certainly not Lennart's fault, but cases like this definitely cause individuals to feel progressively more and more trapped by systemd's continued existence.

In striking contrast from that conception of the social scene around systemd, my recent discussions on these forums with Tom Gundersen were very nice (can be read starting with my first post in the thread here: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...291#post441291). He certainly drinks the systemd Kool-Aid but isn't intoxicated by it. He agrees with the way systemd operates and defends the project honestly, but he showed a willingness to discuss and an eagerness to fill in the gaps in his knowledge while avoiding being abrasive while filling the gaps in mine. Those are qualities I respect and enjoy and the experience certainly painted both a more complete and more pleasant picture of systemd. Unfortunately, I haven't had the pleasure of engaging in a similar kind of discussion with Lennart himself.

In summary, systemd's bad reputation and Lennart's community woes don't come from nowhere, but the community also has some work to do for the members to either be constructive in their comments, contribute to what they consider solutions, or at least be a bit less abrasive in their intolerance.

[leiptrstormr]

Does anyone actually know if this kerio person is real and not just another lennart sockpuppet? This wouldn't be the first time someone made death threats against themselves for the added drama. His post was certainly humorous. I think if he is this fragile, he should get out of open source and develop hugboxes.

[niner]

Does anyone actually know if this kerio person is real and not just another lennart sockpuppet? This wouldn't be the first time someone made death threats against themselves for the added drama. His post was certainly humorous. I think if he is this fragile, he should get out of open source and develop hugboxes.

Of course instead of condoning lowly and unacceptable not to forget criminal behavior, we invent some conspiracy theory to blame the victim!? What you call "humorous", is called a felony where I live. There was no grin, no chuckle, no smiley, no "but seriously". There was just talk about hiring a hitman, cutting Lennart's hands off and having Lennart hit by a bus. That's no joke and nothing anyone has to put up with.

[prodigy_]

It's old news. Lennart has always been this way - his attitude may have marginally worsened over the years but only marginally. And I really dislike how it's all suddenly much more about him being an arrogant prick and much less about his projects being total crap polluting the ecosystem and undermining the very foundations of FOSS in Linux userland.

[nanonyme]

Two words: Eternal September

[not_leiptrstormr]

Does anyone actually know if this kerio person is real and not just another lennart sockpuppet? This wouldn't be the first time someone made death threats against themselves for the added drama. His post was certainly humorous. I think if he is this fragile, he should get out of open source and develop hugboxes.

Nobody talks about Lennart this way and gets away with it. I have put a hit out on your life XD