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.

With Lennart spearheading projects like systemd and PulseAudio that have ruffled the feathers of some users, Lennart is no stranger to controversy but today wrote about how "the Open Source community is full of assholes, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source." He also claims to receive hate mail from people who want him to stop developing and how reportedly there's even a Bitcoin collection for people trying to hire a hitman for him.

Lennart actually places some blame with Linus Torvalds. Lennart reasoned, "But more importantly, I'd actually put some blame on a certain circle of folks that play a major role in kernel development, and first and foremost Linus Torvalds himself. By many he is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one. If he posts words like "[specific folks] ...should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" (google for it), than that's certainly bad. But what I find particularly appalling is the fact that he regularly defends this, and advertises this as an efficient way to run a community. (But it is not just Linus, it's a certain group of people around him who use the exact same style, some of which semi-publically even phantasize about the best ways to, ... well, kill me)."

Lennart ended his Google+ post with, "My personal conclusion out of all this is mostly just that I don't want to have much to do with the worst offenders, and the communities they run. My involvement with the kernel community ended pretty much before it even started, I never post on LKML, and haven't done in years. Also, in our own project we are policying posts. We regularly put a few folks on moderation on the mailing list, and we will continue to do so. Currently, the systemd community is fantastic, and I really hope we can keep it that way. And that's all about this topic from me. I have no intentions to ever talk about this again on a public forum."

Read his remarks on full via his Google+ page. This post comes just a few days after on the kernel mailing list were various attacks over systemd and Poettering.