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Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In"
An anonymous reader writes "Free software programmer Lennart Poettering has been part of his fair share of controversy in the open source community, and his latest essay may raise the most eyebrows yet. Poettering takes on the idea that the community is one big happy family and has some harsh words for the loudest and most obnoxious members. He says in part: "I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple 'petitions' on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a 'song' on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks. On IRC, people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more."
You're trying to make it sound like it's some sort of middle school vendetta when it's really nothing of the sort. What you describe does happen but it's not a relevant thing to consider here.
I did not immediately recognize the name. So it did not initially understand why this poor fellow would be making these kinds of complaints. Then I Googled him and all became clear.
It's little wonder he's feeling hounded right about now.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Poettering is not a troll. He's a software developer, who has the unforunateness of writing lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like.
Simply not liking someone's software is one thing, but the level of Poettering hate, while amusing, is counterproductive, and at sometimes scary.
That said, I'm a fan of the man and his work, based purely on its technical merrits.
It's one thing to fork a single tool, but it's quite another thing to fork an entire distribution, one which already has complex organization like a legal registration and funds in the bank, and which has slowly gained hard-won recognition in government and business circles. Debian, all of the Debian-derived distros, OpenSuse and Arch have adopted systemd, and those who oppose systemd can't just create a distro of such maturity and respect overnight. Sure, Slackware and the *BSDs are left, but losing Debian too was a hard blow, and it's understandable that systemd opponents are feeling a sense of desperation.
UNIX, and Linux, were designed with the concept that the hardware configuration was static during operation. So "startup" and "configuration" occured at the same time. Now that many peripherals hot-plug, that model is obsolete. Many people find it painful to switch to an "everything is dynamic" model, especially since, for many server applications, there is no hot-plugging.
Hence the unhappiness with a redesign.
This is a more general problem with UNIX/Linux. Many programs are designed on the assumption that they read a static configuration file in text format, and will be restarted if the configuration changes. Various hacks have been added to some programs to allow dynamic reconfiguration (often involving sending a signal to the process to tell it to re-read a text file). Real dynamic configuration models usually involve storing the configuration in a database, which a lot of UNIX/Linux types don't like.
He's the developer of Avahi, Pulseaudio, and Systemd, most prominently. These components are standard middleware (userspace programs, usually that run in the background, which provide useful services to make a Linux distro more useful than just providing a terminal). The first two were accepted mostly uncontroversially; I mean, pulseaudio did have some pushback, but systemd has had orders of magnitude more pushback than pulseaudio. Now that the most popular distros ship systemd by default, people who don't like it are railing against both the program and its author(s).
People need to get a life.
hilarious link with this newspaper like graphics saying "the london stock exchange choses windows over linux for reliability"
yet, wikipedia here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... states :
Technology
The LSE's current trading platform is its own Linux-based edition named Millennium Exchange.[12]
Their old trading platform TradElect was based on Microsoft's .NET Framework, and was developed by Microsoft and Accenture. Microsoft used the LSE software as an example of the supposed superiority of Windows over Linux in the "Get the Facts" campaign,[13] claiming that the LSE system provided "five nines" reliability, and a processing speed of 3–4 milliseconds. For Microsoft, LSE was a good combination of a highly visible exchange and yet a relatively modest IT problem.[14]
Despite TradElect only being in use for about two years,[15] after suffering multiple periods of extended downtime and unreliability[16][17] the LSE announced in 2009 that it was planning to switch to Linux in 2010.[18][19]
"Lennart, I knew Hans Reiser. Hans Reiser was a friend of mine. Lennart Poettering, you're no Hans Reiser."
For those that don't get the above: ... Reiser was convicted of the first degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in September 2006. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder, as part of a settlement agreement that included disclosing the location of his wife's body, revealed to be in a shallow grave near the couple's home."
"Hans Thomas Reiser is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. He is the creator and primary developer of the ReiserFS computer file system, which is contained within the Linux kernel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Or, in car analogy terms:
If one guy tailgates you and then passes you on the right, he's an asshole.
If 50 people tailgate you and then pass you on the right, take a goddamn hint.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Unfortunately, yes they do. Unless you want to switch to BSD, or roll your own distribution -- which now involves resurrecting old init shell scripts, or writing new one, and maintaining them going forward -- you are very likely to be forced to use systemd by the distro or 3rd party apps that deeply integrate systemd.
Let me set you straight:
The discussions of systemd's technical discussions have happened, over and over. See point #2 above.
Poettering is not a troll..
No, he's a troll, just of a different sort. If you want proof of his trolling, here you go. The haranguing and general harassment starts at around 12:00 and continues for the rest of the presentation (almost 45 minutes), gradually getting more and more volatile as things progress. You can see how uncomfortable the presenter is, and he starts flipping through slides at the end because he's run out of time, all because Poettering chewed up his time being a jerk. Poettering should have written down his points and discussed them after the presentation ended. But the very end... well, where I come from, nothing says "douchebag" to me like getting up on stage, beer in hand... fuck it, just watch the video. Also take note of his "usually we don't get much criticism" comment around 54:00 -- classic textbook narcissism combined with ostrich syndrome.
I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of the fellow giving the presentation, while simultaneously asking yourself "why didn't the folks putting on the event do something?"
Nothing justifies Poettering getting death threats or things that could actually impact him personally (deeply) or professionally -- I urge everyone to actually read, not skim, RFC 2635 (Lennart should be the first to) -- but karma is playing somewhat of a role here. The video should speak for itself. It is that type of personality that I think drives people to dislike him in the same way that people dislike Theo de Raadt.
Anyway, his whinging makes me chuckle a bit because it's extremely pot-kettle-black, but nobody should be subjected to physical threats, continual harassment, or anything even remotely extreme like that.
I mean, pulseaudio did have some pushback, but systemd has had orders of magnitude more pushback than pulseaudio.
If by "some pushback" you mean "was utterly unusable for at least 4 years", then that part is at least true. Of course systemd has more pushback: it's the same sort of badly written, badly designed garbage that's injecting itself into the bootup process rather than being just a user-facing mess that was trivial to remove.
People need to get a life.
Some of us have lives that include being paid to take care of Linux servers, which this crap makes significantly more difficult.
Poettering is not a troll. He's a software developer, who has the unforunateness of writing lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like.
Caveat: I am a part-time contribuer to two geeky distros, meaning I get paid in beer at conferences, and so am constantly inundated with seeing a certain cycle play out over IRC and email lists. This isn't about that at all, rather it's the community being treated as less of a community and more MBA/business tactics being employed against that community -- and eventually hitting resistance against people with little other leverage. There are several things going on:
1. It isn't that people don't like the software and/or design choices, it is that Poettering and Redhat have made design/business decisions purely to force adoption of what they want as business tactics to push "a standard" which happens to be Redhat. This is not good community behavior, and instead of competing on technical merits makes people feel they are competing via other tactics. For example, if they roll in udev, you then either have to fork udev and deal with keeping it patched or adopt systemd. No one has a real issue with logind as software as consolekit wasn't getting much love, but then Gnome3 depends on logind, and logind depends on Systemd, so then you'd have to fork Gnome3 to stay off systemd. And on, and on.
2. They have made claims they haven't followed through on, and come to be seen as disingenious in what they say. There is little to no reason for udev to be rolled into systemd, the "it's easier to develop as one tree" stuff is true yet kind of silly considering the issues it causes for everyone else. Still, it was claimed it'd also be seperate so people should just relax and not make a fuss... and then udev became dependent. It is a tactic that gets repeated because it works unless you are really paying attention. Another example coming to mind is text logging vaporware: "Don't worry, we get that you need that but adopt it now as we'll have an option shortly on month x where you can turn off binary logging and have..." and then just decide not to do it.
3. They have pushed solutions that aren't ready for prime-time for everyone, yet gloss over everyone having serious problems and/or shunt the blame elsewhere. This doesn't build community.
4. His software has become politicized, often by Poettering himself as a tactic. Poettering will mock rather than people who don't share his views and are interacting/criticizing choices rationally and calmly. Just a bit ago I watched him publically mocking gentoo devs who have been putting time into eudev as an alternative, using the same verbage someone might to mock climate-change deniers. It's language obviously designed to mock and exclude. When he then complains about the same, it just furthers the image people have of him.
5. Redhat and Poettering have some really, really big sticks: mostly a bank account to pay developers to have things and an existing code base/market. If you're debian, gentoo or any distro, forking half of Gnome3, etc, etc just to deal with this stuff is one hell of a tall ask considering how they are comprised and/or not funded. Many users lacking any of this leverage are using the tools they feel they have: public vitriol and mocking.
I run systemd, but I basically had to switch because I had no choice. I agree with Poettering on some technical issues, disagree with him greatly on others, and absolutely abhore how they treated the community. In every controversy involving him I can think of, it all could have been avoided via either 5% more effort on Poettering/Redhat's part.
He convinced Gnome and other things to depend on it. He presents an API with a built in dependency hazard and claims it's no problem. He made it so it fails if it isn't PID 1.
He also won't fix a critical bug, and here's a dozen more reasons to hate this crapware.
Lennart, pack your things and go, or start playing nice finally!
It makes you seem like a dipshit to fail to understand that you aren't supposed to be in the far left lane unless you are passing the car in the left. That's the law. I don't know how many times I've been on I-75 behind a dipshit like you running a snail race against the car in the right. The car in the right lane speeds up, you speed up. The car in the right lane slows down, you slow down. Now you know why everyone flips your stupid ass off as they finally pass you on the right side you smug, self righteous bastard.