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"Lennart is a skilled dev with some excellent ideas and some controversial ideas. The stuff he designs eventually ends up being picked by distributions and defa

by beedogs 11y ago

"Lennart is a skilled dev with some excellent ideas and some controversial ideas. The stuff he designs eventually ends up being picked by distributions and defaulted." He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" really doesn't endear him to folks here and elsewhere, especially in light of his own behavior.

scrollaway 11y ago
> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. As an archlinux TU, an LXDE/LXQt developer and someone close to a lot of distro maintainers, I can assure you, it's not. Systemd got popular because it's good, and it fixes and standardizes a lot of pain points. Red Hat being behind the development just means the product gets actively developed. Not all software has the chance to flourish like that.
- AdieuToLogic 11y ago
  As a multi-platform Unix developer and someone often responsible for system administration, I can assure you that systemd does in fact "standardizes [sic] a lot of pain points." It being good is where we certainly disagree. Red Hat funding the product means more than it being actively developed. It also implies control over the offering's compatibility, functionality, and direction. It means control over everything an OS using it can do as all processes will have systemd as its parent.
bkor 11y ago
> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. Systemd was chosen by various distributions because it works and was way better than what was there before. Works for Red Hat is not a consideration in this. Note: I actually follow Mageia, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora. In each of these distributions, the decision was not never "works for Red Hat". Even for e.g. Ubuntu, the decision was more or less: "Debian chose it". > That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" Can you provide evidence of that? He's pretty easy to deal with, that is one of the reasons. You get a clear answer each time. Might totally disagree with it, but that's different matter.
- vacri 11y ago
  Given that Fedora is based on and sponsored by Red Hat, it's a significant stretch to suggest that their decision to move to systemd was made completely independently of RH. Just like Ubuntu's decision was "upstream chose it", the same goes for Fedora.
  - bkor 11y ago
    The comment I responded to said it was used because of Red Hat. You're changing it to "completely independently of RH". If you look at the history, systemd was rejected for various Fedora releases. The suggestion here is that it is used because of Red Hat. While in practice even the Red Hat sponsored distribution rejected it various times. This distribution has the notion of being "first" with things.
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      > If you look at the history, systemd was rejected for various Fedora releases. Perhaps for some pre-release stuff. In reality and in the long run, Fedora was arguably the first distro to adopt systemd (as I remember rather fondly, when I first tried Fedora primarily to give this newfangled "systemd" a whirl; boy, was that a goddamn mistake), and it being owned and operated by Red Hat is no coincidence. Fedora is a testbed for RHEL. What you see in Fedora now is what you'll see in RHEL and CentOS (perhaps with some stabilization and testing) in the next couple years. Implying that Fedora's decision to incorporate systemd was in any way not influenced by the fact that Red Hat created it is absurd.
vidarh 11y ago
> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. That could possibly explain with it ends up in RedHat derivative distributions. It does not explain why so much of it ends up in a lot of the other big distro families, many of who have demonstrated perfect willingness to make choices that go actively against RedHat's direction in the past. > That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" really doesn't endear him to folks here and elsewhere, especially in light of his own behavior. Given the amount of abuse he's taking, he clearly has sufficient evidence to justify making that statement. It might not endear him to people to actually make it, but why would he care to endear himself to people that are giving him everything from rather disgusting levels of abuse to death threats?
- yellowapple 11y ago
  > It does not explain why so much of it ends up in a lot of the other big distro families, many of who have demonstrated perfect willingness to make choices that go actively against RedHat's direction in the past. Sure it does. Like it or not, Red Hat is quite influential. Most of the differences from Red Hat's direction stem from before Red Hat had started going in a particular direction, or were from before Red Hat was especially influential in the realm of GNU/Linux. Debian's package system, for example, predates RPMs by 3 years, which is why Debian didn't feel the need to adopt Red Hat's RPM. Meanwhile, most distros (that aren't direct descendants of Debian, at least) have adopted RPM instead of APT/dpkg as their package manager (with a few exceptions, namely the "SAG Trifecta" as I like to call them (Slackware, Arch, Gentoo), though Slackware's package system predates even Debian's, and Gentoo's is based on a BSD-style ports tree and isn't exactly a binary package system; even Slackware, however, ships with RPM tools in order to convert RPM packages to its own tarball-based package format). If you look closely, very little modern development in the GNU/Linux distro world deviates particularly strongly from the Red Hat direction; most new developments tend to follow Red Hat (even Ubuntu, with its Not-Invented-Here syndrome raging relentlessly, has gradually begun to concede to the Red Hat way via Debian). The GNU/Linux world isn't like the BSD world, where enhancements are frequently traded between the BSDs (better networking drivers from OpenBSD here, a new hardware target from NetBSD here, some newfangled graphics stack improvements from FreeBSD there, etc.). Red Hat seems to be the epicenter of ideas for most distros nowadays (at least the ones that are universally adopted, in contrast with ideas from Novell and Canonical which tend to stay localized to SUSE and Ubuntu (respectively).
x0 11y ago
I believe he called them assholes after the threats moved from criticism to personal attacks. Though maybe I'm biased because I agree with him (well, part of the community anyway, you guys have always been alright).
jdub 11y ago
Lennart's projects were picked up as dependencies of other open source projects and by major distributions long before he started working at Red Hat.

by beedogs 11y ago

scrollaway 11y ago

> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. As an archlinux TU, an LXDE/LXQt developer and someone close to a lot of distro maintainers, I can assure you, it's not. Systemd got popular because it's good, and it fixes and standardizes a lot of pain points. Red Hat being behind the development just means the product gets actively developed. Not all software has the chance to flourish like that.

AdieuToLogic 11y ago
As a multi-platform Unix developer and someone often responsible for system administration, I can assure you that systemd does in fact "standardizes [sic] a lot of pain points." It being good is where we certainly disagree. Red Hat funding the product means more than it being actively developed. It also implies control over the offering's compatibility, functionality, and direction. It means control over everything an OS using it can do as all processes will have systemd as its parent.

bkor 11y ago

> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. Systemd was chosen by various distributions because it works and was way better than what was there before. Works for Red Hat is not a consideration in this. Note: I actually follow Mageia, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora. In each of these distributions, the decision was not never "works for Red Hat". Even for e.g. Ubuntu, the decision was more or less: "Debian chose it". > That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" Can you provide evidence of that? He's pretty easy to deal with, that is one of the reasons. You get a clear answer each time. Might totally disagree with it, but that's different matter.

vacri 11y ago
Given that Fedora is based on and sponsored by Red Hat, it's a significant stretch to suggest that their decision to move to systemd was made completely independently of RH. Just like Ubuntu's decision was "upstream chose it", the same goes for Fedora.
- bkor 11y ago
  The comment I responded to said it was used because of Red Hat. You're changing it to "completely independently of RH". If you look at the history, systemd was rejected for various Fedora releases. The suggestion here is that it is used because of Red Hat. While in practice even the Red Hat sponsored distribution rejected it various times. This distribution has the notion of being "first" with things.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    > If you look at the history, systemd was rejected for various Fedora releases. Perhaps for some pre-release stuff. In reality and in the long run, Fedora was arguably the first distro to adopt systemd (as I remember rather fondly, when I first tried Fedora primarily to give this newfangled "systemd" a whirl; boy, was that a goddamn mistake), and it being owned and operated by Red Hat is no coincidence. Fedora is a testbed for RHEL. What you see in Fedora now is what you'll see in RHEL and CentOS (perhaps with some stabilization and testing) in the next couple years. Implying that Fedora's decision to incorporate systemd was in any way not influenced by the fact that Red Hat created it is absurd.

vidarh 11y ago

> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. That could possibly explain with it ends up in RedHat derivative distributions. It does not explain why so much of it ends up in a lot of the other big distro families, many of who have demonstrated perfect willingness to make choices that go actively against RedHat's direction in the past. > That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" really doesn't endear him to folks here and elsewhere, especially in light of his own behavior. Given the amount of abuse he's taking, he clearly has sufficient evidence to justify making that statement. It might not endear him to people to actually make it, but why would he care to endear himself to people that are giving him everything from rather disgusting levels of abuse to death threats?

yellowapple 11y ago
> It does not explain why so much of it ends up in a lot of the other big distro families, many of who have demonstrated perfect willingness to make choices that go actively against RedHat's direction in the past. Sure it does. Like it or not, Red Hat is quite influential. Most of the differences from Red Hat's direction stem from before Red Hat had started going in a particular direction, or were from before Red Hat was especially influential in the realm of GNU/Linux. Debian's package system, for example, predates RPMs by 3 years, which is why Debian didn't feel the need to adopt Red Hat's RPM. Meanwhile, most distros (that aren't direct descendants of Debian, at least) have adopted RPM instead of APT/dpkg as their package manager (with a few exceptions, namely the "SAG Trifecta" as I like to call them (Slackware, Arch, Gentoo), though Slackware's package system predates even Debian's, and Gentoo's is based on a BSD-style ports tree and isn't exactly a binary package system; even Slackware, however, ships with RPM tools in order to convert RPM packages to its own tarball-based package format). If you look closely, very little modern development in the GNU/Linux distro world deviates particularly strongly from the Red Hat direction; most new developments tend to follow Red Hat (even Ubuntu, with its Not-Invented-Here syndrome raging relentlessly, has gradually begun to concede to the Red Hat way via Debian). The GNU/Linux world isn't like the BSD world, where enhancements are frequently traded between the BSDs (better networking drivers from OpenBSD here, a new hardware target from NetBSD here, some newfangled graphics stack improvements from FreeBSD there, etc.). Red Hat seems to be the epicenter of ideas for most distros nowadays (at least the ones that are universally adopted, in contrast with ideas from Novell and Canonical which tend to stay localized to SUSE and Ubuntu (respectively).

x0 11y ago

I believe he called them assholes after the threats moved from criticism to personal attacks. Though maybe I'm biased because I agree with him (well, part of the community anyway, you guys have always been alright).

jdub 11y ago

Lennart's projects were picked up as dependencies of other open source projects and by major distributions long before he started working at Red Hat.