14 ms·

Lennart Poettering on the state of open source communities

211 points by omnibrain 12y ago

chris_wot 12y ago
Not every open source community. The LibreOffice community is very positive and encouraging. The codebase needs lots of refactoring, but we are all in this together and we are getting results! And we are doing it by being nice to one another. Frankly, I don't think we'd get any momentum if we didn't.
- mercurial 12y ago
  Yes, I agree that the atmosphere and the rules enforced differ between communities. It's also true that the Linux kernel community is known for its strong language and personal attacks (the last time I remember it being featured prominently on HN and elsewhere was when Sarah Sharp called out Linus on his behaviour [1]). But maybe LKML feels like it needs drama from time to time? 1: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634 https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634
  - throwaway28763 12y ago
    I think the key is the paragraph about honesty vs. politics. In several projects people put on a corporate face on the mailing lists while doing backstabbing and politics on IRC and Twitter. Linus is at least honest.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    Most of the particularly vicious flak Poettering gets isn't even really from the Linux kernel community, but just from random internet people who have an opinion. There's traditionally a bit of an expectation of a "meritocracy of code" in LKML where you can't yell too loudly if you don't also contribute (not necessarily literally "code", also documentation, testing, code review, hardware specs, etc.). I think the degree to which it's an idealized meritocracy can easily be overstated, but it does tend to at least raise the bar for ranting, since you can't only rant without ever doing anything else. The general internet doesn't really feel constrained by that, so you have people who know next to nothing about the Linux kernel who nevertheless feel entitled to very strong and intemperately expressed opinions about it.
    - sqrt17 12y ago
      This is pretty much it: Linus Thorvald telling people to go screw themselves is an argument of "I am widely recognized to have the loudest voice because of many useful contributions, now accept my opinion or go away". This carries the danger of people shortening it into "I have the loudest voice" in their mind, which begs the question how other communities unite the role of "last instance for contentious questions" (aka benevolent dictator) with the ideal of being nice to everyone.
      - _delirium 12y ago
        Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this architecture is shit" than "you're shit". They can be taken personally (and imo are sometimes over the top), but they don't seem intended in a more vicious way as trying to "hit" a particular person. When he does criticize people it ends up being pretty measured, e.g. a widely talked about blog post where he "attacks" RMS [1] is not a flame at all, but just him saying he isn't a huge fan of RMS and thinks RMS is a bit of a single-issue, black-and-white type of person. Which is a personal criticism, but a pretty civil one. And he definitely doesn't stoop to starting campaigns to try to drive people out of the open-source community who he doesn't like; he just works with them or doesn't. [1] http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white....
        anon1385 12y ago
        >Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this architecture is shit" than "you're shit". I don't see how it gets much more personal than starting off a mail to a new contributor with the line: *YOU* are full of bullshit. Even the supposed 'meat' of the argument was a thinly veiled personal insult: Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus
        XorNot 12y ago
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    For those paying attention, that above lkml thread ended with Sarah Sharp stating that she'll bring and distribute pot brownies to everyone on stage at linuxconf. No word on whether GKH or Linus enjoyed them. :-)
- thejosh 12y ago
  The Drupal community is pretty damn good too.
jiggy2011 12y ago
The problem with "communities" that mainly exist online is that they are not really communities at all, instead they are people scattered across different websites with only the loosest of connections and absolutely no barrier to entry whatsoever and there is no way with which people can be expelled. Therefor it becomes easy for any online community to attract many people who are more interested in the drama and tribalism that surrounds the community than the goals of the community itself,. Posting "systemd sucks" (or more personal things) is much lower effort than actually building an alternative to systemd.
- mercurial 12y ago
  There is nothing hard about kicking repeat offenders from an "official" mailing list/subreddit/IRC channel for breaking community guidelines. You just need to set up clear rules, explain them if needed, and expel people too thick to follow the rules, and have enough moderators. Trolls may still complain on other forums, but it will make the place much more liveable for people actually interested in exchanging and contributing.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    In the article he talks about people posting stuff about him to other websites, namely youtube , 4chan (or at least in 4chan "style") and petition websites.
    - mercurial 12y ago
      Fair point. You can't really police the Internet. I had more in mind some ridiculous overreactions that have happened in the past in various forums. But you will always have the cowardly, usually anonymous abusers.
seba_dos1 12y ago
It's rather "Lennart Poettering on how communities react to him". He's very controversial person and it's not like he didn't earned that title by himself. Of course stuff like death threats cannot and shouldn't be justified in any way (however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with highly controversial topics), but things like petitions are just hyperbolic opinions on Poettering's work and on how it affects all of us. Poettering is no longer mere "technical guy" from "technical community". He's more like political figure, and political figures have to deal with various political reactions.
- mercurial 12y ago
  > however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with highly controversial topics Come on. We're talking about init systems here, not the Palestine/Israel conflict. It should be possible to have a level-headed discussion without insults and death threats. Saying "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, therefore it's OK" isn't right.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    > We're talking about init systems here I think the background for this has more to do with Avahi and PulseAudio than systemd.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      Also, at this time systemd comes with daemons or utilities for logging, network time, DNS, DHCP, network management, and is poised to act as the intermediary between dbus and kdbus, as well as provide user space virtual terminals. I am likely forgetting something here, but systemd is way more than a "mere" init replacement at this time.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Folks from those communities have tied up this debate to their identities. http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
anon4 12y ago
Excuse me if I don't trust Lennart "all pulseaudio problems are driver/application problems, get fucked" Poettering to tell me about online communities.
- zimpenfish 12y ago
  Your point might be better made if you weren't anonymous. Also if it had less victim blaming.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - jessaustin 12y ago
    Are you trying to win an irony award?
    - zimpenfish 12y ago
      That would only work if my username wasn't -astonishingly- easy to link back to my real self. Not even 5 minutes of work.
dimman 12y ago
I'm not defending shitty bevaiour at all (and taking it to a personal level such as killing people, thats just insane). Having said that, I'm not surprised though that the shitstorm is hitting systemd (and Lennart Poettering) perhaps most of all. My observation of whats happening is quite frankly that people do not like the enforcing approach of systemd. There is no humble approach, it's the systemd approach and don't stand in the way.
- ben0x539 12y ago
  > (and taking it to a personal level such as killing people, thats just insane) It's not "insane". It's a thing people do because they get the impression that it's socially acceptable, because see, everybody sympathizes with people griping about systemd, right? Everybody agrees that Poettering is the devil, right? He's bringing it on himself by sneaking into people's houses and installing systemd on their computers, right? It's not insane. It doesn't stem from some imbalance in brain chemistry or some other mental issue. Labeling it insanity belies the community's responsibility for setting standards of acceptable behavior.
  - dimman 12y ago
    If people take it to the level of actually murdering him, then yes, it's insane.
    - XorNot 12y ago
      It's hardly an OSS problem though. It's practically a "western society and the internet" problem. Death threats are probably less common now then they were in the early anonymity days of the net, but conversely they're a lot less mundane. But this a problem which turns up in every community where there are politicized issues. See: anything to do with women talking about video games. We can take this problem even wider and start looking at say, American domestic politics and it's infatuation with "second amendment solutions". It's apparently socially acceptable to drop that phrase when discussing elections, policy and the president when you're a state or federal representative. Locally in Australia we've got an entire political party that carefully fans the flames of almost but not quite encouraging violence and intolerance. You can certainly improve things at a community-by-community level, and OSS definitely should try to do so (and there should be support to do so in sensible, constructive ways). But this is a problem which goes a lot further then software development.
exDM69 12y ago
I'm very grateful that Lennart Poettering wrote this post. I don't necessarily use the software he writes (my next distro will be systemd based) but I'm still happy that he writes it. It has advanced the state of Linux distributions (due to PulseAudio, lots of ALSA driver bugs were found and fixed, systemd has prompted improvements to other init/acpid/udev/automount/etc software too) regardless whether you use the software he wrote or not. But the amount of flak he receives is unacceptable. The tone which people talk about him and even to him is despicable. I'm glad he spoke up and hopefully people will realize that open source contributors are people too. If you have a technical reason to disagree, taking it personal is not constructive.
- laumars 12y ago
  I don't advocate bullying nor would I dare to justify such personal attacks. But the abusive content aside, he does deserve constructive criticism because, frankly, his contributions towards open source have brought far more problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace. I could write a lengthy blog post about the unnecessary problems that PulseAudio and systemd have thrown up over the years (problems I'd never had an issue with in all the years of running Linux and other UNIX-like platforms), but those topics are done to death now. However my point is I think Lennart's been so carelessly cavalier in rolling out his code, and so unapologetic about the shitstorm he started that he's gotten a lot of peoples back up. Obviously this doesn't warrant the kind of bullying that he discussed in his post; however although he doesn't deserve such attacks, he has largely brought them on himself. Maybe instead of fighting against the community as he tries to impose his own imperial vision of Linux, maybe if he worked with the community then the aggressive dickheads might leave him alone (or at least he'd receive more supporters from friendly folk - of who massively outnumber the aforementioned dickheads). But just to be clear, as much as I think he might draw negative attention to himself, I think that any kind of personal abuse, let alone of the quantity that Lennart's been subject to, is absolutely disgusting and undeserved. Period.
  - joelthelion 12y ago
    > his contributions towards open source have brought far more problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace. If this were true, nobody would have adopted his work. If most of the major distros have switched to pulseaudio and systemd, it's because the people who actually know about this stuff have looked at his work and found it excellent.
mappu 12y ago
I don't think this problem is anything particular to open-source communities. There's lots of popular software that is poorly received (Windows 8). There's the software people hate, and the software nobody uses. (Of course turning it into a personal attack is very poor behaviour.)
flohofwoe 12y ago
I don't know much of the drama around systemd, but this sounds like a typical "everyone's an asshole except me" post. First, he's shooting a broadside against all Open Source communities, but it all seems to be about 'I don't agree with Linus'. To me the Linux community seems to be quite successful in quickly identifying and kicking out destructive assholes and drama queens which don't help solve problems but only create new ones, otherwise Linux wouldn't be in the state it is.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  It's the 'everybody hates me, therefore everyone is a sad hater filled with hatred' argument.
- Argorak 12y ago
  For me, it sounds more like an "that weird, abusive shit people talk about? It's real!"-post. He does, for example, admit that he did not always live up to those standards he wants.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - flohofwoe 12y ago
    Sure, but why is he specifically calling Open Source communities 'sick places' when this happens everywhere else too, including the real world outside the internet?
    - ben0x539 12y ago
      "Why doesn't he address all other evils in the world before the one I feel defensive about? The hypocrite!" It's probably because he specifically works in and identifies with the larger open source community, and because people who (pretend to?) collect money to get him killed specifically identify with the open source community too.
    - Argorak 12y ago
metafex 12y ago
Yes, Open Source communities can be bad. But there are also good ones. And if you think Linus is bad, read some comments from Theo de Raadt. The first opensource project I tried to contribute to when I started coding has been a horrible experience. When I asked about some directions regarding some details, the only responses I got were not nice, to say the least. f.i. they complained that i mixed british and american english, and that was the most constructive response. Well, stuff like that can happen if your 13, from austria and never had a proper english-teacher before ;-) OTOH there are also the good experiences where people help each other out and aren't afraid to teach someone how things work. there are a lot of good FOSS communities out there. For me personally the guys around the Aboriginal Linux project stand out. They have been really helpful on IRC and the ML is also refreshing to read :)
mrottenkolber 12y ago
Death threats aside (violence it just silly, please stop it?)... How many persons managed to acquire the amount of hate Poettering did? Jup, not many. From my experience the OSS community can be quite dismissive of people who ignore prior art. Its a protective shield against bad design. You can not write good software as a large group by accepting people who fumble too bad. It's ok to submit a patch with a bug, its ok if the first implementation isn't any good. But when you have people who consistently push bad design, at some point it will slip through and the next generation of engineers as to deal with someones bad idea. Thus a conservative stance makes sense when it comes to APIs and architectures. Now I know Poettering mainly for PulseAudio and systemd, both systems I really don't care for. My distribution of choice doesn't ship those, so I don't really have any gripes with him, but the fact that he is backed by a large vendor (RedHat?) is scary. Imagine systemd/PulseAudio/whatever-to-come will be pushed into the "Linux core" by corporate pressure, funding etc. How will I explain to my children that they are stuck with shitty-software-X? "Sorry son, there is no technical merit, its an ambitious guy's fault who was backed by RedHat." I am already stuck with ALSA, if getting into a mud fight would help to avoid future clusterfucks, you could count me in. I don't think it helps though, so there is really no point in flaming the dude. Instead I suggest to use all this energy to discredit/control/QA his work on a scientific level.
- tinco 12y ago
  Your whole comment is irrelevant, worse, detrimental even to the discussion. The discussion is about the violence. I think your stance on this is disgusting. You suggest that if it would deter the guy from building his software you would participate in his torment? That's weak, perhaps the foundation of this situation is that some of these open source communities attract people with especially weak personalities.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    >there is really no point in flaming the dude. Instead I suggest to use all this energy to discredit/control/QA his work on a scientific level. Their stance is that Poettering shouldn't be attacked on a personal level, only on a technical level. If that is a irrelevant, detrimental, disgusting manifestation of a weak personality to you, I suggest that you loosen your grip on your pearls.
Thesaurus 12y ago
Pottering needs to toughen up if he wants to dictate the majority of userland. His attachment to Google+ is a bit annoying from a FOSS perspective too.
- dalke 12y ago
  "Torvalds needs to tone down if he wants to dictate the majority of kernel space" isn't much of an argument, is it? I don't see how your comment regarding Pottering is any stronger. Our attachment to Hacker News is also a bit annoying from a FOSS perspective, unless there's been some release since the suggestion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037 . Torvalds uses Google+. How is your comment any different from the pot calling the kettle black?
  - Thesaurus 12y ago
    Torvalds needs to tone down nothing. The Kernel would be utter shit if he wasn't cracking the whip on people. I personally find his language on LKML hysterical and enlightening; he writes well too. I appreciate when people are honest and don't sugar coat things. I wasn't aware Torvalds uses G+, shame on him for doing so. The comment was more about the absurd policies the user signs off on to use the service more than the lack of source code, not that that isn't an issue. HN being closed source is a bummer. I respect a webmasters choice to refrain from publishing server side code. But considering most of the content discussed on HN, it is hypocritical. As unethical as HN is from a FOSS standpoint, I can't turn away from a site where the user-base falls on the right side of a bell curve for I.Q. Too good to pass up.
Wilya 12y ago
Oh, come on. Poettering wants to show how his community is nice and welcoming, and he does it by... making gratuitous attacks at Gentoo? Sounds legit.
1ris 12y ago
>The Linux community is dominated by western, white, straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days. I perfectly fit in that pattern, and the rubbish they pour over me is awful. Maybe you are the problem. I don't know a single OSS developer that is more hated than you. Ever wondered why this might be?
- IshKebab 12y ago
  It's because he implicitly and explicitly points out the very real flaws in desktop linux. And then he has the audacity to try and fix things by changing them! If there's one thing people hate more than having flaws pointed out in something they like, it's someone else changing that thing and making it better. Not only does it feel like an insult, but it means that all that pain you went through to learn bash/xfree86.conf/ifconfig/alsactl/etc. is now irrelevant. I don't see how you can seriously argue against systemd. The lack of integration and modernity in desktop linux has hurt it. Does no-one remember how much of a pain in the arse it was to simply connect to a WPA2 wifi network for years? That was because wifi configuration was a jumbled assortment of (really secure no doubt) shell scripts - not something that is easy to interface to a GUI. We should be celebrating the fact that someone is fixing the mess that is the linux userspace. Anyway, none of this justifies the stupid amount of hatred inflicted on him. And I've still yet to see a sane technical criticism of systemd.
  - makomk 12y ago
    Actually, the main problem with wifi on Linux was that the drivers were crap and there were a bunch of competing WiFi stacks with mutally-incompatible APIs. If you had a decent driver, connecting to an access point and authenticating was - and still is - handled entirely by a small, single-purpose monolithic program called wpa_supplicant. The "jumbled assortment of (really secure no doubt) shell scripts" didn't need to know or care whether your network was WPA2. All they had to do was start wpa_supplicant and wait for it to tell them it had connected. Most of the complexity and issues came from older, incompatible drivers with their own built-in WPA supplicants (or no WPA support at all) that aren't supported anymore.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
rdsubhas 12y ago
Before we throw any more hate again, here's what I understand: * Most Linux-based OSS communities (specially the kernel) market themselves as a Merry Community * In reality, they're not, they're full of bullies who won't hesistate to call you or your mother names * You must equally be a bully enough if you want to stand on your own And I relate with this a lot. Bullies act like this in groups, and they always feel extremely proud and righteous of themselves, and think they're doing God's Work. But beyond all that overflowing sense of righteousness, bullying is simply, plainly, wrong. Unfortunately, most of these Linux-based communities have grown to become bands of bullies, and they are also extremely proud of it. Such a sad situation to be in. Folks who call themselves "Freedom-loving FOSS members" behaving in polar opposite to the values that they supposedly care about. Some things are just unacceptable.
- sqrt17 12y ago
  IMO, you misunderstand some of it: "communities are full of bullies who won't hesitate to call you or your mother names" - I think this is best put as "doing controversial things will attract trolls and haters". "you must equally be a bully enough" - no, you just need to tune out the haters and continue to work towards your goal. Lennart and the others underwent a ginormous effort to grow systemd from a borderline dangerous "I'm smarter than everyone else" toy project into something that's actually useful. They did that despite the fact that the problem in question had been solved a couple times over (upstart was the last in a series of "improved" versions of SysVInit), and despite the fact that systemd adoption incurs a large switching cost of re-writing init scripts for all packages. The art of leading a successful open source project is partly in tuning in to useful feedback and tuning out the haters who have nothing to contribute. Yes, the haters function based on ways that are similar to bullying. But while you can keep them off the mailing list, you can't ban them everywhere. The more visible a community or an undertaking, the more visible it is for haters and bullies, and the more effort is lost on policing them or tuning them out. There's no way around it, other than educating the general population or staying a small, very technical in-group.
  - inclemnet 12y ago
    > the problem in question had been solved a couple times over This seems a bit disingenous. Unless you think upstart is literally perfect, the problem is obviously not solved, only iterated on...and without further arguments there's no reason systemd shouldn't attempt to be the next (further improved) iteration. Systemd certainly has features upstart doesn't, some of which are prominent arguments for its adoption. So it seems the community doesn't agree - no, upstart is not the pinnacle of init systems.
im3w1l 12y ago
Wow, fundraising a hitman. That is horrible.
roghummal 12y ago
>My involvement with the kernel community ended pretty much before it even started, I never post on LKML, and haven't done in years. Poor baby. Why is everyone so mean to him? He's western, white, straight, male, 30s-40s (really?). > I can only imagine that it is much worse for members of minorities, or people from different cultural backgrounds, in particular ones where losing face is a major issue. Speaks for itself.
jpswade 12y ago
I know nothing about this man, so I decided to look him up... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversi... "The "Poettering effect" is now sometimes used as a negative term for presumed damage his mindset is doing to opensource communities." https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry-pi/-02E5S4E6bI/NsFZgjv62yEJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry-pi/... I guess there's two sides to every story... What a strange situation.
- hyperpape 12y ago
  But notice that's all technical in nature--what he's discussing is abuse and harassment. I don't know a lot about the context, but if he's right, those are very different things--not really two sides at all.
  - jpswade 12y ago
    He says "Wow, what an awful community Linux has!". How is that "technical in nature"?
    - hyperpape 12y ago
      No, the reasons people dislike him are primarily technical in nature: they don't trust the things he creates. They respond by attacking him in a very personal and abusive way. That's not an issue that has two sides. That's an issue about his technical work, and then some people doing something abusive. There's two sides to that technical debate, but there's only one side to the other debate, and that's "stop being awful." There would only be two sides if the technical issues surrounding his work somehow justified the abuse. And they don't, because basically nothing justifies that kind of abuse in the tech world. The comment "Linux is an awful community" is not technical, but it came after the abuse. Hopefully you can see that there's a difference between that and threatening someone.
      - jpswade 12y ago
        "Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the linux ecosystem" It seems to read that he is basically going around systematically "upsetting the applecart". Now, whether he's doing that technically or otherwise, it's still having an effect on the ecosystem. You can't detach yourself from that.
olgeni 12y ago
Well, the "western, white, straight, male, blah, blah" rhetoric should at least bring out some pavlovian support these days. Maybe it's time to replace Linus as BDFL, and this could be a fine tactic too. I stopped caring so long ago that I wasn't even hit by pulseaudio, so both Lennart and Mr. Drepper have my sympathy and support, as long as they keep to Linux (thankyouverymuch).
- tux3 12y ago
  First they came for Linux, and I did not speak out— Because I was not using Linux. ...
notacoward 12y ago
Take a group of ill-tempered, aggressive bears. Walk among them wearing a suit made of salmon. Not going to end well. Much of what Lennart says about the kernel community is true. Much of what they say about him is also true. While he might stay away from invective and hyperbole, the underlying contempt and dismissiveness of reasonable concerns is still there. This is one fight where nobody in their right mind would want to support either side.
monochr 12y ago
And Mr. Poettering should know all about being an obnoxious asshole: http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s
- pantalaimon 12y ago
  Why is that video always brought forward? Datenwolf obviously has no clue what he's talking about and Lennart tells him where he is wrong.
  - nisa 12y ago
    Datenwolf looks at the problems from the sysadmin perspective and all he is seeing and complaining about is complexity that introduces hard to debug problems and bugs. Sure his criticism is derided by Lennart as he has far more intimate knowledge about the software. However 'Did you file a bug?' and 'Do you hate disabled users?' actually are not helping here either. It's complicated and modern Desktop Linux userland (ConsoleKit/PolKit/dbus/pulseaudio/GNOME...) feels like a sub-optimal solution from a sysadmin perspective. Maybe systemd will fix some of these issues but some are afraid it will introduce others. Having dealt with "modern Desktop Linux" I can totally relate to Datenwolf. I understand that he lacks knowledge but if you are not a developer of these systems it's impossible to deal with this mess. And yes - I think it's largely a undocumented, poorly implemented and overly complex mess.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      And that seems to be the eternal issue. Poettering seems to come at this not from an admin perspective but from a developer perspective. And with RH shifting their focus more and more towards cloud computing, so is systemd. And in cloud computing the admins are not kings, but peons. Peons tilling the cattle (server) farm of 100s of servers, each running any number of VM instances. If one or more of those instances go down, new ones are spun back up. And you see this attitude within systemd. If a daemons crashes you don't leave it down and try to figure out why it crashes. Instead systemd will simply restart any daemon it finds not to be running when it should. Basically this is not uptime by way of applying carefully measured and maintained administration. This is uptime by machinegun. It is what allows anyone with some grasp of php to rent server time on a amorphous blob like the Amazon EC2 and spin up the next Twitter or Facebook. No need to optimize for or maintain the hardware. If the current load is too much, wave your credit card and have 1000 fresh instances behind the the load balancer, courtesy of Amazon or RH. Datenwolf is demonstrating the kind of exasperation that have in the past driven people to look for alternatives to Windows. They thought they had found the promised land in Linux, but now the blight is coming over the walls and taking up residence even here.
theflubba 12y ago
Poettering is a complete asshole and deserves all the hate he gets. He replaces perfectly fine software with his own shitty code, and has done noting innovative in his entire life.
sudowhodoido 12y ago
Circa 2002-2006 I was quite active in the Linux community I.e. I contributed some code to a few GNU projects and a couple of kernel patches to solve problems that were, quite selfish really. But hey it turns out it wasn't just me or my company so I thought I'd contribute them. They solved real problems to be honest (driver bugs and crashes). Having been on the end of a chunk of hate for about 40% of my work simply on political grounds rather than any technical grounds, I can understand this entirely and I have no problem with Lennart at all on this basis. I'm talking about patches, not reengineering either. The basic problem was raising a defect "X doesn't work properly, here's a tested fix that we deployed in production". The answer was ticket closed. I reopened, and asked for an explanation. Literally "get fucked, we don't want your 'fix'". I replied "I'll patch my own kernel and SRPMS then" followed by a massive lecture from one of the project leaders on how I should be communicating with the community and that I need to be part of the special circle jerk club on that project to get a patch in. The defects were even removed from the trackers if the community members were rude to the outsiders to hide the fact. So out of the goodness of my own heart I wasted 5 days with GDB debugging shit, wrote a patch that fixed it and raised a ticket with the patch attached, was closed, BANG. This happened 4 times on different projects. So yes I do find that a number of the higher profile projects are purely powered by liquid asshole. Unfortunately that makes me want to rely on the platforms less and has made me shift my focus to the Windows and BSD platforms which are surprisingly less political. Argh. I even hated writing this.
pdkl95 12y ago
Any group of people that grows will eventually accumulate traits that resemble humanity in general. This means that once a group is sufficiently large enough it will probably contain some of the jerks, too. The proper response, of course, is to ignore them unless you have evidence of some actual specific threat which should be brought to the attention of law enforcement, not complained about on the web. Any group that grows eventually has to deal with these jerks, and most learn to just file the rant based "threats" to /dev/null where they belong. There is one data point you can possibly extract from the sudden appearance of jerks ranting about your work: it is a rough heuristic that suggest that group of people has grown "sufficiently large". People working in the arts sometimes take this as a suggestion that they have "made it", as they have finally achieved an audience that is large enough that touches on a diverse cross-section of the population, and n not just their original niche. So this suggest that the thing Mr. Poettering is complaining about... is that the people whgo oppose his software have become so large that normal users from random parts of society are complaining. It is proof that it is not, as many suggest, a small amount of unix beards[1] that are doing the complaining. Mr. Poettering just needs to learn that when you make it big by trowing your weight around - especially when you deliver your own testosterone-fueled challenges and insults - you are making yourself a target. This may or may not be deserved, but if you want to survive in a world where assholes and jerks still exist you need to learn to not take their insults too personally. /* I'll point out that this general advice is true for anybody with a large audience. If I were to reply to the long history of how systemd forced a coup and hostile takeover of the linux community, then i might suggest that while there area always assholes, this does stink a bit like he's responding to a situation nicely setup for him by some agent provocateur. It certainly fits his cabal's historical style. / Edit; for the record, in no way am I condoning* jerks that merely throw around insults and threats. I am simply stating that they are inevitable once your audience is big enough. [1] myself included; also: https://imgur.com/QWkbh https://imgur.com/QWkbh
elementai 12y ago
Every time I see a similar submission on how bad FOSS communities are, I can't help but wonder - what do we do about it then? People react violently not always solely because of their nature, but also because they don't see a reasonable way to change things. It probably would help better for Poettering to write a post addressing systemd criticism, maybe there is one, but it never made to HN for some reason.
mickrussom 12y ago
lennart poettering is the santa claus politician of *nix , well just Linux because none of his garbage ports. He promises stuff that does magic and its free, but the reality is hey can deliver, nor his sycophants and minions, anything that works. He is poetter-izing linux, making it suck in the same ways as many commercial OSen. I have to say systemd is the crappiest rip off of SMF I have ever seen.

211 points by omnibrain 12y ago

Not every open source community. The LibreOffice community is very positive and encouraging. The codebase needs lots of refactoring, but we are all in this together and we are getting results! And we are doing it by being nice to one another. Frankly, I don't think we'd get any momentum if we didn't.

mercurial 12y ago
Yes, I agree that the atmosphere and the rules enforced differ between communities. It's also true that the Linux kernel community is known for its strong language and personal attacks (the last time I remember it being featured prominently on HN and elsewhere was when Sarah Sharp called out Linus on his behaviour [1]). But maybe LKML feels like it needs drama from time to time? 1: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634 https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634
- throwaway28763 12y ago
  I think the key is the paragraph about honesty vs. politics. In several projects people put on a corporate face on the mailing lists while doing backstabbing and politics on IRC and Twitter. Linus is at least honest.
- _delirium 12y ago
  Most of the particularly vicious flak Poettering gets isn't even really from the Linux kernel community, but just from random internet people who have an opinion. There's traditionally a bit of an expectation of a "meritocracy of code" in LKML where you can't yell too loudly if you don't also contribute (not necessarily literally "code", also documentation, testing, code review, hardware specs, etc.). I think the degree to which it's an idealized meritocracy can easily be overstated, but it does tend to at least raise the bar for ranting, since you can't only rant without ever doing anything else. The general internet doesn't really feel constrained by that, so you have people who know next to nothing about the Linux kernel who nevertheless feel entitled to very strong and intemperately expressed opinions about it.
  - sqrt17 12y ago
    This is pretty much it: Linus Thorvald telling people to go screw themselves is an argument of "I am widely recognized to have the loudest voice because of many useful contributions, now accept my opinion or go away". This carries the danger of people shortening it into "I have the loudest voice" in their mind, which begs the question how other communities unite the role of "last instance for contentious questions" (aka benevolent dictator) with the ideal of being nice to everyone.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this architecture is shit" than "you're shit". They can be taken personally (and imo are sometimes over the top), but they don't seem intended in a more vicious way as trying to "hit" a particular person. When he does criticize people it ends up being pretty measured, e.g. a widely talked about blog post where he "attacks" RMS [1] is not a flame at all, but just him saying he isn't a huge fan of RMS and thinks RMS is a bit of a single-issue, black-and-white type of person. Which is a personal criticism, but a pretty civil one. And he definitely doesn't stoop to starting campaigns to try to drive people out of the open-source community who he doesn't like; he just works with them or doesn't. [1] http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white....
      - anon1385 12y ago
        >Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this architecture is shit" than "you're shit". I don't see how it gets much more personal than starting off a mail to a new contributor with the line: *YOU* are full of bullshit. Even the supposed 'meat' of the argument was a thinly veiled personal insult: Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus
        XorNot 12y ago
- anonbanker 12y ago
  For those paying attention, that above lkml thread ended with Sarah Sharp stating that she'll bring and distribute pot brownies to everyone on stage at linuxconf. No word on whether GKH or Linus enjoyed them. :-)
thejosh 12y ago
The Drupal community is pretty damn good too.

jiggy2011 12y ago

The problem with "communities" that mainly exist online is that they are not really communities at all, instead they are people scattered across different websites with only the loosest of connections and absolutely no barrier to entry whatsoever and there is no way with which people can be expelled. Therefor it becomes easy for any online community to attract many people who are more interested in the drama and tribalism that surrounds the community than the goals of the community itself,. Posting "systemd sucks" (or more personal things) is much lower effort than actually building an alternative to systemd.

mercurial 12y ago
There is nothing hard about kicking repeat offenders from an "official" mailing list/subreddit/IRC channel for breaking community guidelines. You just need to set up clear rules, explain them if needed, and expel people too thick to follow the rules, and have enough moderators. Trolls may still complain on other forums, but it will make the place much more liveable for people actually interested in exchanging and contributing.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  In the article he talks about people posting stuff about him to other websites, namely youtube , 4chan (or at least in 4chan "style") and petition websites.
  - mercurial 12y ago
    Fair point. You can't really police the Internet. I had more in mind some ridiculous overreactions that have happened in the past in various forums. But you will always have the cowardly, usually anonymous abusers.

seba_dos1 12y ago

It's rather "Lennart Poettering on how communities react to him". He's very controversial person and it's not like he didn't earned that title by himself. Of course stuff like death threats cannot and shouldn't be justified in any way (however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with highly controversial topics), but things like petitions are just hyperbolic opinions on Poettering's work and on how it affects all of us. Poettering is no longer mere "technical guy" from "technical community". He's more like political figure, and political figures have to deal with various political reactions.

mercurial 12y ago
> however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with highly controversial topics Come on. We're talking about init systems here, not the Palestine/Israel conflict. It should be possible to have a level-headed discussion without insults and death threats. Saying "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, therefore it's OK" isn't right.
- xorcist 12y ago
  > We're talking about init systems here I think the background for this has more to do with Avahi and PulseAudio than systemd.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Also, at this time systemd comes with daemons or utilities for logging, network time, DNS, DHCP, network management, and is poised to act as the intermediary between dbus and kdbus, as well as provide user space virtual terminals. I am likely forgetting something here, but systemd is way more than a "mere" init replacement at this time.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Folks from those communities have tied up this debate to their identities. http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

anon4 12y ago

Excuse me if I don't trust Lennart "all pulseaudio problems are driver/application problems, get fucked" Poettering to tell me about online communities.

zimpenfish 12y ago
Your point might be better made if you weren't anonymous. Also if it had less victim blaming.
- deleted 12y ago
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- jessaustin 12y ago
  Are you trying to win an irony award?
  - zimpenfish 12y ago
    That would only work if my username wasn't -astonishingly- easy to link back to my real self. Not even 5 minutes of work.

dimman 12y ago

I'm not defending shitty bevaiour at all (and taking it to a personal level such as killing people, thats just insane). Having said that, I'm not surprised though that the shitstorm is hitting systemd (and Lennart Poettering) perhaps most of all. My observation of whats happening is quite frankly that people do not like the enforcing approach of systemd. There is no humble approach, it's the systemd approach and don't stand in the way.

ben0x539 12y ago
> (and taking it to a personal level such as killing people, thats just insane) It's not "insane". It's a thing people do because they get the impression that it's socially acceptable, because see, everybody sympathizes with people griping about systemd, right? Everybody agrees that Poettering is the devil, right? He's bringing it on himself by sneaking into people's houses and installing systemd on their computers, right? It's not insane. It doesn't stem from some imbalance in brain chemistry or some other mental issue. Labeling it insanity belies the community's responsibility for setting standards of acceptable behavior.
- dimman 12y ago
  If people take it to the level of actually murdering him, then yes, it's insane.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    It's hardly an OSS problem though. It's practically a "western society and the internet" problem. Death threats are probably less common now then they were in the early anonymity days of the net, but conversely they're a lot less mundane. But this a problem which turns up in every community where there are politicized issues. See: anything to do with women talking about video games. We can take this problem even wider and start looking at say, American domestic politics and it's infatuation with "second amendment solutions". It's apparently socially acceptable to drop that phrase when discussing elections, policy and the president when you're a state or federal representative. Locally in Australia we've got an entire political party that carefully fans the flames of almost but not quite encouraging violence and intolerance. You can certainly improve things at a community-by-community level, and OSS definitely should try to do so (and there should be support to do so in sensible, constructive ways). But this is a problem which goes a lot further then software development.

exDM69 12y ago

I'm very grateful that Lennart Poettering wrote this post. I don't necessarily use the software he writes (my next distro will be systemd based) but I'm still happy that he writes it. It has advanced the state of Linux distributions (due to PulseAudio, lots of ALSA driver bugs were found and fixed, systemd has prompted improvements to other init/acpid/udev/automount/etc software too) regardless whether you use the software he wrote or not. But the amount of flak he receives is unacceptable. The tone which people talk about him and even to him is despicable. I'm glad he spoke up and hopefully people will realize that open source contributors are people too. If you have a technical reason to disagree, taking it personal is not constructive.

laumars 12y ago
I don't advocate bullying nor would I dare to justify such personal attacks. But the abusive content aside, he does deserve constructive criticism because, frankly, his contributions towards open source have brought far more problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace. I could write a lengthy blog post about the unnecessary problems that PulseAudio and systemd have thrown up over the years (problems I'd never had an issue with in all the years of running Linux and other UNIX-like platforms), but those topics are done to death now. However my point is I think Lennart's been so carelessly cavalier in rolling out his code, and so unapologetic about the shitstorm he started that he's gotten a lot of peoples back up. Obviously this doesn't warrant the kind of bullying that he discussed in his post; however although he doesn't deserve such attacks, he has largely brought them on himself. Maybe instead of fighting against the community as he tries to impose his own imperial vision of Linux, maybe if he worked with the community then the aggressive dickheads might leave him alone (or at least he'd receive more supporters from friendly folk - of who massively outnumber the aforementioned dickheads). But just to be clear, as much as I think he might draw negative attention to himself, I think that any kind of personal abuse, let alone of the quantity that Lennart's been subject to, is absolutely disgusting and undeserved. Period.
- joelthelion 12y ago
  > his contributions towards open source have brought far more problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace. If this were true, nobody would have adopted his work. If most of the major distros have switched to pulseaudio and systemd, it's because the people who actually know about this stuff have looked at his work and found it excellent.

mappu 12y ago

I don't think this problem is anything particular to open-source communities. There's lots of popular software that is poorly received (Windows 8). There's the software people hate, and the software nobody uses. (Of course turning it into a personal attack is very poor behaviour.)

flohofwoe 12y ago

I don't know much of the drama around systemd, but this sounds like a typical "everyone's an asshole except me" post. First, he's shooting a broadside against all Open Source communities, but it all seems to be about 'I don't agree with Linus'. To me the Linux community seems to be quite successful in quickly identifying and kicking out destructive assholes and drama queens which don't help solve problems but only create new ones, otherwise Linux wouldn't be in the state it is.

pessimizer 12y ago
It's the 'everybody hates me, therefore everyone is a sad hater filled with hatred' argument.
Argorak 12y ago
For me, it sounds more like an "that weird, abusive shit people talk about? It's real!"-post. He does, for example, admit that he did not always live up to those standards he wants.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- flohofwoe 12y ago
  Sure, but why is he specifically calling Open Source communities 'sick places' when this happens everywhere else too, including the real world outside the internet?
  - ben0x539 12y ago
    "Why doesn't he address all other evils in the world before the one I feel defensive about? The hypocrite!" It's probably because he specifically works in and identifies with the larger open source community, and because people who (pretend to?) collect money to get him killed specifically identify with the open source community too.
  - Argorak 12y ago

metafex 12y ago

Yes, Open Source communities can be bad. But there are also good ones. And if you think Linus is bad, read some comments from Theo de Raadt. The first opensource project I tried to contribute to when I started coding has been a horrible experience. When I asked about some directions regarding some details, the only responses I got were not nice, to say the least. f.i. they complained that i mixed british and american english, and that was the most constructive response. Well, stuff like that can happen if your 13, from austria and never had a proper english-teacher before ;-) OTOH there are also the good experiences where people help each other out and aren't afraid to teach someone how things work. there are a lot of good FOSS communities out there. For me personally the guys around the Aboriginal Linux project stand out. They have been really helpful on IRC and the ML is also refreshing to read :)

mrottenkolber 12y ago

Death threats aside (violence it just silly, please stop it?)... How many persons managed to acquire the amount of hate Poettering did? Jup, not many. From my experience the OSS community can be quite dismissive of people who ignore prior art. Its a protective shield against bad design. You can not write good software as a large group by accepting people who fumble too bad. It's ok to submit a patch with a bug, its ok if the first implementation isn't any good. But when you have people who consistently push bad design, at some point it will slip through and the next generation of engineers as to deal with someones bad idea. Thus a conservative stance makes sense when it comes to APIs and architectures. Now I know Poettering mainly for PulseAudio and systemd, both systems I really don't care for. My distribution of choice doesn't ship those, so I don't really have any gripes with him, but the fact that he is backed by a large vendor (RedHat?) is scary. Imagine systemd/PulseAudio/whatever-to-come will be pushed into the "Linux core" by corporate pressure, funding etc. How will I explain to my children that they are stuck with shitty-software-X? "Sorry son, there is no technical merit, its an ambitious guy's fault who was backed by RedHat." I am already stuck with ALSA, if getting into a mud fight would help to avoid future clusterfucks, you could count me in. I don't think it helps though, so there is really no point in flaming the dude. Instead I suggest to use all this energy to discredit/control/QA his work on a scientific level.

tinco 12y ago
Your whole comment is irrelevant, worse, detrimental even to the discussion. The discussion is about the violence. I think your stance on this is disgusting. You suggest that if it would deter the guy from building his software you would participate in his torment? That's weak, perhaps the foundation of this situation is that some of these open source communities attract people with especially weak personalities.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >there is really no point in flaming the dude. Instead I suggest to use all this energy to discredit/control/QA his work on a scientific level. Their stance is that Poettering shouldn't be attacked on a personal level, only on a technical level. If that is a irrelevant, detrimental, disgusting manifestation of a weak personality to you, I suggest that you loosen your grip on your pearls.

Thesaurus 12y ago

Pottering needs to toughen up if he wants to dictate the majority of userland. His attachment to Google+ is a bit annoying from a FOSS perspective too.

dalke 12y ago
"Torvalds needs to tone down if he wants to dictate the majority of kernel space" isn't much of an argument, is it? I don't see how your comment regarding Pottering is any stronger. Our attachment to Hacker News is also a bit annoying from a FOSS perspective, unless there's been some release since the suggestion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037 . Torvalds uses Google+. How is your comment any different from the pot calling the kettle black?
- Thesaurus 12y ago
  Torvalds needs to tone down nothing. The Kernel would be utter shit if he wasn't cracking the whip on people. I personally find his language on LKML hysterical and enlightening; he writes well too. I appreciate when people are honest and don't sugar coat things. I wasn't aware Torvalds uses G+, shame on him for doing so. The comment was more about the absurd policies the user signs off on to use the service more than the lack of source code, not that that isn't an issue. HN being closed source is a bummer. I respect a webmasters choice to refrain from publishing server side code. But considering most of the content discussed on HN, it is hypocritical. As unethical as HN is from a FOSS standpoint, I can't turn away from a site where the user-base falls on the right side of a bell curve for I.Q. Too good to pass up.

Wilya 12y ago

Oh, come on. Poettering wants to show how his community is nice and welcoming, and he does it by... making gratuitous attacks at Gentoo? Sounds legit.

1ris 12y ago

>The Linux community is dominated by western, white, straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days. I perfectly fit in that pattern, and the rubbish they pour over me is awful. Maybe you are the problem. I don't know a single OSS developer that is more hated than you. Ever wondered why this might be?

IshKebab 12y ago
It's because he implicitly and explicitly points out the very real flaws in desktop linux. And then he has the audacity to try and fix things by changing them! If there's one thing people hate more than having flaws pointed out in something they like, it's someone else changing that thing and making it better. Not only does it feel like an insult, but it means that all that pain you went through to learn bash/xfree86.conf/ifconfig/alsactl/etc. is now irrelevant. I don't see how you can seriously argue against systemd. The lack of integration and modernity in desktop linux has hurt it. Does no-one remember how much of a pain in the arse it was to simply connect to a WPA2 wifi network for years? That was because wifi configuration was a jumbled assortment of (really secure no doubt) shell scripts - not something that is easy to interface to a GUI. We should be celebrating the fact that someone is fixing the mess that is the linux userspace. Anyway, none of this justifies the stupid amount of hatred inflicted on him. And I've still yet to see a sane technical criticism of systemd.
- makomk 12y ago
  Actually, the main problem with wifi on Linux was that the drivers were crap and there were a bunch of competing WiFi stacks with mutally-incompatible APIs. If you had a decent driver, connecting to an access point and authenticating was - and still is - handled entirely by a small, single-purpose monolithic program called wpa_supplicant. The "jumbled assortment of (really secure no doubt) shell scripts" didn't need to know or care whether your network was WPA2. All they had to do was start wpa_supplicant and wait for it to tell them it had connected. Most of the complexity and issues came from older, incompatible drivers with their own built-in WPA supplicants (or no WPA support at all) that aren't supported anymore.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago

rdsubhas 12y ago

Before we throw any more hate again, here's what I understand: * Most Linux-based OSS communities (specially the kernel) market themselves as a Merry Community * In reality, they're not, they're full of bullies who won't hesistate to call you or your mother names * You must equally be a bully enough if you want to stand on your own And I relate with this a lot. Bullies act like this in groups, and they always feel extremely proud and righteous of themselves, and think they're doing God's Work. But beyond all that overflowing sense of righteousness, bullying is simply, plainly, wrong. Unfortunately, most of these Linux-based communities have grown to become bands of bullies, and they are also extremely proud of it. Such a sad situation to be in. Folks who call themselves "Freedom-loving FOSS members" behaving in polar opposite to the values that they supposedly care about. Some things are just unacceptable.

sqrt17 12y ago
IMO, you misunderstand some of it: "communities are full of bullies who won't hesitate to call you or your mother names" - I think this is best put as "doing controversial things will attract trolls and haters". "you must equally be a bully enough" - no, you just need to tune out the haters and continue to work towards your goal. Lennart and the others underwent a ginormous effort to grow systemd from a borderline dangerous "I'm smarter than everyone else" toy project into something that's actually useful. They did that despite the fact that the problem in question had been solved a couple times over (upstart was the last in a series of "improved" versions of SysVInit), and despite the fact that systemd adoption incurs a large switching cost of re-writing init scripts for all packages. The art of leading a successful open source project is partly in tuning in to useful feedback and tuning out the haters who have nothing to contribute. Yes, the haters function based on ways that are similar to bullying. But while you can keep them off the mailing list, you can't ban them everywhere. The more visible a community or an undertaking, the more visible it is for haters and bullies, and the more effort is lost on policing them or tuning them out. There's no way around it, other than educating the general population or staying a small, very technical in-group.
- inclemnet 12y ago
  > the problem in question had been solved a couple times over This seems a bit disingenous. Unless you think upstart is literally perfect, the problem is obviously not solved, only iterated on...and without further arguments there's no reason systemd shouldn't attempt to be the next (further improved) iteration. Systemd certainly has features upstart doesn't, some of which are prominent arguments for its adoption. So it seems the community doesn't agree - no, upstart is not the pinnacle of init systems.

im3w1l 12y ago

Wow, fundraising a hitman. That is horrible.

roghummal 12y ago

>My involvement with the kernel community ended pretty much before it even started, I never post on LKML, and haven't done in years. Poor baby. Why is everyone so mean to him? He's western, white, straight, male, 30s-40s (really?). > I can only imagine that it is much worse for members of minorities, or people from different cultural backgrounds, in particular ones where losing face is a major issue. Speaks for itself.

jpswade 12y ago

I know nothing about this man, so I decided to look him up... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversi... "The "Poettering effect" is now sometimes used as a negative term for presumed damage his mindset is doing to opensource communities." https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry-pi/-02E5S4E6bI/NsFZgjv62yEJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry-pi/... I guess there's two sides to every story... What a strange situation.

hyperpape 12y ago
But notice that's all technical in nature--what he's discussing is abuse and harassment. I don't know a lot about the context, but if he's right, those are very different things--not really two sides at all.
- jpswade 12y ago
  He says "Wow, what an awful community Linux has!". How is that "technical in nature"?
  - hyperpape 12y ago
    No, the reasons people dislike him are primarily technical in nature: they don't trust the things he creates. They respond by attacking him in a very personal and abusive way. That's not an issue that has two sides. That's an issue about his technical work, and then some people doing something abusive. There's two sides to that technical debate, but there's only one side to the other debate, and that's "stop being awful." There would only be two sides if the technical issues surrounding his work somehow justified the abuse. And they don't, because basically nothing justifies that kind of abuse in the tech world. The comment "Linux is an awful community" is not technical, but it came after the abuse. Hopefully you can see that there's a difference between that and threatening someone.
    - jpswade 12y ago
      "Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the linux ecosystem" It seems to read that he is basically going around systematically "upsetting the applecart". Now, whether he's doing that technically or otherwise, it's still having an effect on the ecosystem. You can't detach yourself from that.

olgeni 12y ago

Well, the "western, white, straight, male, blah, blah" rhetoric should at least bring out some pavlovian support these days. Maybe it's time to replace Linus as BDFL, and this could be a fine tactic too. I stopped caring so long ago that I wasn't even hit by pulseaudio, so both Lennart and Mr. Drepper have my sympathy and support, as long as they keep to Linux (thankyouverymuch).

tux3 12y ago
First they came for Linux, and I did not speak out— Because I was not using Linux. ...

notacoward 12y ago

Take a group of ill-tempered, aggressive bears. Walk among them wearing a suit made of salmon. Not going to end well. Much of what Lennart says about the kernel community is true. Much of what they say about him is also true. While he might stay away from invective and hyperbole, the underlying contempt and dismissiveness of reasonable concerns is still there. This is one fight where nobody in their right mind would want to support either side.

monochr 12y ago

And Mr. Poettering should know all about being an obnoxious asshole: http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s

pantalaimon 12y ago
Why is that video always brought forward? Datenwolf obviously has no clue what he's talking about and Lennart tells him where he is wrong.
- nisa 12y ago
  Datenwolf looks at the problems from the sysadmin perspective and all he is seeing and complaining about is complexity that introduces hard to debug problems and bugs. Sure his criticism is derided by Lennart as he has far more intimate knowledge about the software. However 'Did you file a bug?' and 'Do you hate disabled users?' actually are not helping here either. It's complicated and modern Desktop Linux userland (ConsoleKit/PolKit/dbus/pulseaudio/GNOME...) feels like a sub-optimal solution from a sysadmin perspective. Maybe systemd will fix some of these issues but some are afraid it will introduce others. Having dealt with "modern Desktop Linux" I can totally relate to Datenwolf. I understand that he lacks knowledge but if you are not a developer of these systems it's impossible to deal with this mess. And yes - I think it's largely a undocumented, poorly implemented and overly complex mess.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    And that seems to be the eternal issue. Poettering seems to come at this not from an admin perspective but from a developer perspective. And with RH shifting their focus more and more towards cloud computing, so is systemd. And in cloud computing the admins are not kings, but peons. Peons tilling the cattle (server) farm of 100s of servers, each running any number of VM instances. If one or more of those instances go down, new ones are spun back up. And you see this attitude within systemd. If a daemons crashes you don't leave it down and try to figure out why it crashes. Instead systemd will simply restart any daemon it finds not to be running when it should. Basically this is not uptime by way of applying carefully measured and maintained administration. This is uptime by machinegun. It is what allows anyone with some grasp of php to rent server time on a amorphous blob like the Amazon EC2 and spin up the next Twitter or Facebook. No need to optimize for or maintain the hardware. If the current load is too much, wave your credit card and have 1000 fresh instances behind the the load balancer, courtesy of Amazon or RH. Datenwolf is demonstrating the kind of exasperation that have in the past driven people to look for alternatives to Windows. They thought they had found the promised land in Linux, but now the blight is coming over the walls and taking up residence even here.

theflubba 12y ago

Poettering is a complete asshole and deserves all the hate he gets. He replaces perfectly fine software with his own shitty code, and has done noting innovative in his entire life.

sudowhodoido 12y ago

Circa 2002-2006 I was quite active in the Linux community I.e. I contributed some code to a few GNU projects and a couple of kernel patches to solve problems that were, quite selfish really. But hey it turns out it wasn't just me or my company so I thought I'd contribute them. They solved real problems to be honest (driver bugs and crashes). Having been on the end of a chunk of hate for about 40% of my work simply on political grounds rather than any technical grounds, I can understand this entirely and I have no problem with Lennart at all on this basis. I'm talking about patches, not reengineering either. The basic problem was raising a defect "X doesn't work properly, here's a tested fix that we deployed in production". The answer was ticket closed. I reopened, and asked for an explanation. Literally "get fucked, we don't want your 'fix'". I replied "I'll patch my own kernel and SRPMS then" followed by a massive lecture from one of the project leaders on how I should be communicating with the community and that I need to be part of the special circle jerk club on that project to get a patch in. The defects were even removed from the trackers if the community members were rude to the outsiders to hide the fact. So out of the goodness of my own heart I wasted 5 days with GDB debugging shit, wrote a patch that fixed it and raised a ticket with the patch attached, was closed, BANG. This happened 4 times on different projects. So yes I do find that a number of the higher profile projects are purely powered by liquid asshole. Unfortunately that makes me want to rely on the platforms less and has made me shift my focus to the Windows and BSD platforms which are surprisingly less political. Argh. I even hated writing this.

pdkl95 12y ago

Any group of people that grows will eventually accumulate traits that resemble humanity in general. This means that once a group is sufficiently large enough it will probably contain some of the jerks, too. The proper response, of course, is to ignore them unless you have evidence of some actual specific threat which should be brought to the attention of law enforcement, not complained about on the web. Any group that grows eventually has to deal with these jerks, and most learn to just file the rant based "threats" to /dev/null where they belong. There is one data point you can possibly extract from the sudden appearance of jerks ranting about your work: it is a rough heuristic that suggest that group of people has grown "sufficiently large". People working in the arts sometimes take this as a suggestion that they have "made it", as they have finally achieved an audience that is large enough that touches on a diverse cross-section of the population, and n not just their original niche. So this suggest that the thing Mr. Poettering is complaining about... is that the people whgo oppose his software have become so large that normal users from random parts of society are complaining. It is proof that it is not, as many suggest, a small amount of unix beards[1] that are doing the complaining. Mr. Poettering just needs to learn that when you make it big by trowing your weight around - especially when you deliver your own testosterone-fueled challenges and insults - you are making yourself a target. This may or may not be deserved, but if you want to survive in a world where assholes and jerks still exist you need to learn to not take their insults too personally. /* I'll point out that this general advice is true for anybody with a large audience. If I were to reply to the long history of how systemd forced a coup and hostile takeover of the linux community, then i might suggest that while there area always assholes, this does stink a bit like he's responding to a situation nicely setup for him by some agent provocateur. It certainly fits his cabal's historical style. / Edit; for the record, in no way am I condoning* jerks that merely throw around insults and threats. I am simply stating that they are inevitable once your audience is big enough. [1] myself included; also: https://imgur.com/QWkbh https://imgur.com/QWkbh

elementai 12y ago

Every time I see a similar submission on how bad FOSS communities are, I can't help but wonder - what do we do about it then? People react violently not always solely because of their nature, but also because they don't see a reasonable way to change things. It probably would help better for Poettering to write a post addressing systemd criticism, maybe there is one, but it never made to HN for some reason.

mickrussom 12y ago

lennart poettering is the santa claus politician of *nix , well just Linux because none of his garbage ports. He promises stuff that does magic and its free, but the reality is hey can deliver, nor his sycophants and minions, anything that works. He is poetter-izing linux, making it suck in the same ways as many commercial OSen. I have to say systemd is the crappiest rip off of SMF I have ever seen.