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

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