10 ms·

Poettering's behaviour ultimately reflects poorly on his employer, Red Hat. It seems like they just allow this behaviour to continue unchecked. The personal a

by uint32 11y ago

Poettering's behaviour ultimately reflects poorly on his employer, Red Hat. It seems like they just allow this behaviour to continue unchecked. The personal attacks on Poettering should be directed to Red Hat instead, who actually have the power to do something about it.

Sanddancer 11y ago
Redhat unfortunately seems beyond reproach by many, even with all the bad behavior they've allowed under their watch. Ulrich Drepper was an employee of theirs during his most imfamous time as glibc maintainer. Their purchase of Cygnus scattered a lot of real interesting systems development tools, like the Insight debugger, to the wind. Unfortunately, they're one of the loudest mouths in the room, so a lot of their bullshit doesn't get called out, leaving everything worse for the wear.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  And having them all under one (virtual) roof may be producing a echo chamber effect among them. I can't seem to locate it now. But i seem to recall a video released within the last year so so that showed various people from within RH, regarding the history of Linux. And at one point one of them energetically declared "we won" in regards to some "unix war". All in all the video gave the impression of a company culture that had the mentality that they could do no wrong.
  - bonzini 11y ago
    The "Unix wars" refers to the fights among Linux and the various proprietary Unixes (AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris etc.). "We won" referred to Linux, not Red Hat. Of all the proprietary Unixes, only Solaris is still alive and it's partly open source too.
notacoward 11y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat. I don't think you quite understand the relationship Red Hat has with its employees ("associates" in company lingo but I abhor such doublespeak). Allowing those employees to act and speak independently is kind of a core value. That freedom is only curtailed when it directly impacts paying customers to the extent that it would be considered a breach of that relationship. Upstream, in the open-source community, almost anything goes. Yes, that means systemd developers can be a bit priggish. It also means other developers, also employed by Red Hat, can call them out for it. It's the only way to ensure the diversity and meritocracy that are essential to innovation. Otherwise, you end up not being able to trust a word that employees of a company say because you know they'd never dare say anything even slightly inconsistent with the party line. I used to see that when I worked at EMC, just for example, and it's really quite stifling. Personal attacks on Poettering should not be redirected anywhere. For one thing, personal attacks don't get anyone anywhere. Legitimate criticism of his views should be directed at him, just as legitimate criticism of my views should be directed at me and legitimate criticism of your views should be directed at you. There's no reason to bring any third party into it. No matter how much you hate them or why, that's simply irrelevant.
- baconmania 11y ago
  >Legitimate criticism of his views should be directed at him Meanwhile, on the GitHub issue: >Locking this one. Note sure which peanut gallery site linked this... This is clearly a guy who thinks his own opinion is above reproach and the unwashed masses have no right to question him.
  - stephen_g 11y ago
    Most of the discussion on that issue was just useless noise after it got picked up by HN and other sites though, so it makes sense to close that one down for now.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      After it happens enough time you would think a lightbulb would turn somewhere...
      - the_why_of_y 11y ago
        I think there was a light going on: they found that bugzilla.freedesktop.org doesn't offer the right ACL tools to keep the trolls away, so they migrated to github.com's issue tracker.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  I know I'm a tiny fish in the game, but because of the behaviors of Red Hat employees, I am disenclined to purchase products they make, and even use Linux as a whole. People ask my advice, I give it, but don't have control over pursestrings, or anything like that. However, the behavior of Red Hat employees, like Poettering, Sievers, and Drepper before them makes me believe that Red Hat is not an organization that does a good job of creating leaders. The aforementioned people are poor stewards of projects, showing poor technical decision making and poor communications ability, and it reflects poorly on the organization as a whole. Poettering, being a high profile employee of Red Hat, is one of the faces of the company. Because of this, I would argue that Red Hat has a duty to step in from time to time to tell him that what he is doing is harmful in the long term. If they don't do it soon, I can almost guarantee there will be a lot fewer support contracts for Red Hat in the months and years to come; they just don't create dependable developers.
uuoc 11y ago
Hear hear, until Redhat begins to feel some heat from Poettering's (and Seivers and the rest of these fools), these fools will just continue on their arrogant bull in a china factory path they are presently on. Start informing Redhat that these responses on Poettering's part reflect badly on them as a whole, and especially _stop_ paying Redhat any money until the issue is resolved, and Redhat will resolve the issue very quickly.
strictfp 11y ago
RedHat employees have always been quite quirky types working alone with a "luser" attitude. Sad but true.
anonbanker 11y ago
At the risk of a No True Scotsman Fallacy, No linux user uses Redhat for more than 2 years before hating everything about life, or moving on to something better (or getting paid to support the monstrosity). The company seems to thrive on PT Barnum's philosophy of a sucker being born every minute. Poettering and Sievers are just freedesktop.org adding another layer of feces on the pile. The fact that people switch distributions to avoid his applications (NetworkManager, PulseAudio, Avahi, systemd), and the fact that someone hacked XBill to include him because he's a worse villain than Bill Gates, should put him on a level that even Ullrich Drepper couldn't touch, and everyone hated that guy. Redhat has been a useless organization since they chose to promote Havoc Pennington over Carsten Haitzler (longer than any of you have known they exist). Blaming them does nothing to stop their slow lurch over the linux landscape. Boycotting them might, but there are too many RHCE's out there. Best to focus on FDO and Poettering/Sievers.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  On that note, Freedesktop was founded by Pennington...

by uint32 11y ago

Sanddancer 11y ago

Redhat unfortunately seems beyond reproach by many, even with all the bad behavior they've allowed under their watch. Ulrich Drepper was an employee of theirs during his most imfamous time as glibc maintainer. Their purchase of Cygnus scattered a lot of real interesting systems development tools, like the Insight debugger, to the wind. Unfortunately, they're one of the loudest mouths in the room, so a lot of their bullshit doesn't get called out, leaving everything worse for the wear.

digi_owl 11y ago
And having them all under one (virtual) roof may be producing a echo chamber effect among them. I can't seem to locate it now. But i seem to recall a video released within the last year so so that showed various people from within RH, regarding the history of Linux. And at one point one of them energetically declared "we won" in regards to some "unix war". All in all the video gave the impression of a company culture that had the mentality that they could do no wrong.
- bonzini 11y ago
  The "Unix wars" refers to the fights among Linux and the various proprietary Unixes (AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris etc.). "We won" referred to Linux, not Red Hat. Of all the proprietary Unixes, only Solaris is still alive and it's partly open source too.

notacoward 11y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat. I don't think you quite understand the relationship Red Hat has with its employees ("associates" in company lingo but I abhor such doublespeak). Allowing those employees to act and speak independently is kind of a core value. That freedom is only curtailed when it directly impacts paying customers to the extent that it would be considered a breach of that relationship. Upstream, in the open-source community, almost anything goes. Yes, that means systemd developers can be a bit priggish. It also means other developers, also employed by Red Hat, can call them out for it. It's the only way to ensure the diversity and meritocracy that are essential to innovation. Otherwise, you end up not being able to trust a word that employees of a company say because you know they'd never dare say anything even slightly inconsistent with the party line. I used to see that when I worked at EMC, just for example, and it's really quite stifling. Personal attacks on Poettering should not be redirected anywhere. For one thing, personal attacks don't get anyone anywhere. Legitimate criticism of his views should be directed at him, just as legitimate criticism of my views should be directed at me and legitimate criticism of your views should be directed at you. There's no reason to bring any third party into it. No matter how much you hate them or why, that's simply irrelevant.

baconmania 11y ago
>Legitimate criticism of his views should be directed at him Meanwhile, on the GitHub issue: >Locking this one. Note sure which peanut gallery site linked this... This is clearly a guy who thinks his own opinion is above reproach and the unwashed masses have no right to question him.
- stephen_g 11y ago
  Most of the discussion on that issue was just useless noise after it got picked up by HN and other sites though, so it makes sense to close that one down for now.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    After it happens enough time you would think a lightbulb would turn somewhere...
    - the_why_of_y 11y ago
      I think there was a light going on: they found that bugzilla.freedesktop.org doesn't offer the right ACL tools to keep the trolls away, so they migrated to github.com's issue tracker.
Sanddancer 11y ago
I know I'm a tiny fish in the game, but because of the behaviors of Red Hat employees, I am disenclined to purchase products they make, and even use Linux as a whole. People ask my advice, I give it, but don't have control over pursestrings, or anything like that. However, the behavior of Red Hat employees, like Poettering, Sievers, and Drepper before them makes me believe that Red Hat is not an organization that does a good job of creating leaders. The aforementioned people are poor stewards of projects, showing poor technical decision making and poor communications ability, and it reflects poorly on the organization as a whole. Poettering, being a high profile employee of Red Hat, is one of the faces of the company. Because of this, I would argue that Red Hat has a duty to step in from time to time to tell him that what he is doing is harmful in the long term. If they don't do it soon, I can almost guarantee there will be a lot fewer support contracts for Red Hat in the months and years to come; they just don't create dependable developers.

uuoc 11y ago

Hear hear, until Redhat begins to feel some heat from Poettering's (and Seivers and the rest of these fools), these fools will just continue on their arrogant bull in a china factory path they are presently on. Start informing Redhat that these responses on Poettering's part reflect badly on them as a whole, and especially _stop_ paying Redhat any money until the issue is resolved, and Redhat will resolve the issue very quickly.

strictfp 11y ago

RedHat employees have always been quite quirky types working alone with a "luser" attitude. Sad but true.

anonbanker 11y ago

At the risk of a No True Scotsman Fallacy, No linux user uses Redhat for more than 2 years before hating everything about life, or moving on to something better (or getting paid to support the monstrosity). The company seems to thrive on PT Barnum's philosophy of a sucker being born every minute. Poettering and Sievers are just freedesktop.org adding another layer of feces on the pile. The fact that people switch distributions to avoid his applications (NetworkManager, PulseAudio, Avahi, systemd), and the fact that someone hacked XBill to include him because he's a worse villain than Bill Gates, should put him on a level that even Ullrich Drepper couldn't touch, and everyone hated that guy. Redhat has been a useless organization since they chose to promote Havoc Pennington over Carsten Haitzler (longer than any of you have known they exist). Blaming them does nothing to stop their slow lurch over the linux landscape. Boycotting them might, but there are too many RHCE's out there. Best to focus on FDO and Poettering/Sievers.

digi_owl 11y ago
On that note, Freedesktop was founded by Pennington...