Slashdot Mirror
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."
Lennart is 110% correct, but the rampant, mostly unjustified hatred of systemd is going to discredit what he says.
What am I kidding? The "open source" community stopped caring about the effects of their actions years ago. Much easier to just insult Microsoft (with added dollar signs) than worry about your own problems.
"And that's all about this topic from me. I have no intentions to ever talk about this again on a public forum." -- LP ... throws bombs at Linus, generalizes, brings race and culture in as pejoratives ... his post is as well written as systemd
This happens online a lot. It's bad, it's stupid, most of us oppose it, but as GamerGate shows, it can do real harm.
If you've done something to earn that much hate, maybe you ought to take a step back and re-evaluate your position.
People don't like other people for a whole slew of mostly stupid reasons.
You internet presence causes a lot of those non-verbal cues to get left out. We often say a lot of things, but not all things are weighted equally.
If one would say they are for Gun Rights and Anti-Abortion you could think that they are a right wing nut-job. But if you get the non-verbal communications you may find out that the person is actually far more liberal on most issues except for say those too.
A lot of people have a hard time with gray zones anyways, so they can't really get how a person can have a complex relationship between topics and still be in a particular camp.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I haven't like the changes he's caused in Linux, but none of those things are the way one should deal with it. If you don't like where Linux is going, fork things and make it the way you like. These types of actions you'd expect from people with no discernible skills to be able to contribute. If you have skill to contribute, put the work in, if you don't have skills, put some work in and gain them.
He's just butt-hurt that Gentoo won't make systemd it's default init manager.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Well, as someone who seems to pride himself on being unconventional and breaking the status quo, you would think he would understand the position HE put HIMSELF in.
This happens everywhere, I architect'd some stuff for a company using SQL Server and SSRS that was almost free, others in the organization wanted to continue using DB2 and Cognos for millions more $$. Do you really think I had an easy time? I had subtle threats, and plenty of well connected people trying to get rid of me.
So what? If you can't take the heat, keep with convention!
Dearest Lennart,
You can always go to work for those who adore your thinking - Microsoft and Google.
If it looks like the whole world is hurling itself against you? Maybe your headed the wrong direction into oncoming traffic.
I don't excuse boorishness or violence - but Linus and Alan Cox never got this level of treatment. Not even Hans Reiser for his obtuseness, nor Bruce Perens for his ability to scrap in an argument.
Look at the problem in the mirror. Before your friends need to call an intervention.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
He is plenty good at dealing out abuse himself. Interacting with him is not a pleasant experience.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Troll dev complaining when he gets trolled?
I do not take people's word for it when they claim serious things like getting actual valid death threats online. If you have one the first thing the police tell you to do is shut up about it in public forums least you scare away the person before they catch them.
calling for a boycot of some software that he wrote is a reasonable thing to do.
the 'song' posted on lkml is not.
I hope the FBI is all over the site trying to collect bitcoins to hire a hitman as that crosses over to outright illegal actions
But by putting it all in one list, LP is trying to make it so that anyone disagreeing with him is lumped in with the people attempting murder. That's also not an acceptable way to engage with those that you disagree with.
David Lang
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In"
You've made your bed, now lay in it.
That is, as it happens, part of the issue: Poettering's view of Linux is not Unix-y.
Redhat, who I believe are funding systemd development, is a server OS company. Guess what doesn't happen on my server? Yes, random hardware appearing and disappearing while it sits there for years running one app.
Systemd has no obvious benefit to servers, but Redhat are pushing it anyway. It could be useful on embedded systems, but, in my experience, they're either massively cut down and use traditional init to start the two or three things they run, or they use some custom init system of their own. Could be useful on desktops, but about the only things I can plug in dynamically are USB devices, which can be handled without much hassle. Faster boot time? Well, my laptop already boots in a few seconds, and my servers spend six minutes in the BIOS before they start booting. Tablets? Maybe, but does Android actually use init scripts, or did they roll their own startup?
It just looks like a solution in search of a problem, with a ton of complexity that 99% of users don't need. But it's being pushed on everyone, anyway.
This happens online a lot. It's bad, it's stupid, most of us oppose it, but as GamerGate shows, it can do real harm.
This is nothing Like GamerGate which was as much about an educated woman calling a routinely demonised group a bunch of cunts...over and over again with a convoluted version of feminism for money championed by the verge...again.(There was some shit about that woman making a game about depression(Good for her) that got maybe more credit than it deserved, which I am really not sure about(Game about depression even if like a simple choice game is cool) and a sex scandal which I love...but nobody got and clearly by my description neither did I).
This is about making changes to the OS that are viewed as unpopular...ribbonbar, real names in youtube, removing reatures from nautilus. Gnome Shell, the list is endless.
the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets.
So he's a troll who specializes in trolling trolls. Why are we feeding him?
Do Not Feed The Trolls
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This guy's victim routine doesn't sound that much different than the anti-gamergate and atheism plus crowd. let's compare..(replying to his full google+ post)
1. Pretending to misunderstand hyperbole as legitimate threats. (the 'fandom' song he mentioned, and his statements about comments made by linus).
2. Labeling criticism of his effort as a systemwide cultural problem (implying all OSS devs are assholes, and he can't even bring himself to type out the word for fear of being 'offensive'). Then later he types out 'fuck'. Go figure..
3. Many appeals to political correctness; the main argument being that the OSS culture survived in spite of the targeted behavior as opposed to because of it.
4. He targets the gentoo community specifically. Of course, it's one of the only distributions that still gives users a choice in whether to use his software stack, so he labels them all as 'haters.' Again, par for the course in 'social justice' circles.
5. Attack on the internet community as a whole. Lots of groups like to do this now. I think the main reason for this is part of an increased trend against anonymous speech, mainly by people with poor arguments who feel first and (maybe) think later, and by those with something to gain or hypocrisy to hide. It's just more generalization, which is ironic considering that generalization is usually one of the behaviors they accuse people of.
6. Finally, he attacks straight white males, which he acknowledges he is, but then makes implicit and explicit appeals of "I'm not like the others, I'm a victim of them, so help me fight the evil horde!." His whole piece is evidence to the contrary.
Again these closely parallel the behavior of the social 'justice' warriors targeting the atheism and gaming communities. Like them, I suspect that poettering is trying to hide from criticism by calling himself a victim. Don't let him. Linus is correct in booting these people out (or at least putting them in their places) before they gain momentum. They are parasites who sap resources away from the original goal and refocus them towards building hugboxes and/or political platforms. Communities that cultivate the dynamics poettering takes issue with is what keeps these groupthink hugboxes from metastasizing into forces that block the objective (technical) truth for the sake of feelings, whether this groupthink spawns naturally or is fostered by people with agendas hungry for resources and control of the zeitgeist.
That's because the first two could be fixed with kill -9. The latter is being crammed down people's throats with what appears to be politically motivated promiscuous dependencies.
Big surprise, try to cram things down people's throats and they come to hate you.
Yes, and typically in companies like microsoft or apple, conflicts between groupthink hugboxes take precedent over what the customer wants because the few individuals who dare to stand up and say 'this is bad' get labeled as 'antisocial' by HR and fired. Windows 8 comes to mind right away.. The IOSification of OSX is another. An OSS equivalent is Gnome.
You don't recall any of the pulseaudio controversies? It's still a POS btw, but it's not quite as bad as it used to be. I have no need for it as ALSA now handles software mixing for today's simple DACs and has done so for years.
Systemd was taken up, because it was the better solution for distros.
No it fucking was not. It was taken up because the pain of living with it was judged to be less than the pain of excising it. Other, equally wrong developers decided to make it a requirement, with the effect that in order to stay with init, we would have to retrofit core elements of GNOME, which would have required significant manpower.
Make no mistake: systemd integration is a textbook example of antidemocratic approaches, of how the commons can be soiled by a very small minority of the people using it. The fact that there was a closely split decision on whether to integrate systemd into Debian should have been read as a damning indictment, and at very least should have given the developers pause. But no, it got chalked up as a victory - which is exactly the kind of thinking that got this shit into our operating systems in the first place.
Any self-respecting developer would have realised that the best way to move systemd forward would be to take an incremental approach, to offer it as an optional component. Any reasonable developer would have had the fucking humility to accept that something so integral to the system cannot be made mature and robust except over the course of time. And until that time, he should perhaps quit fucking saying how sweet his shit smells.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
This!
Or my favorite version:
If you meet an a**hole in the morning. You met an a**hole.
If you meet a**holes all day, you're the a**hole.
I don't excuse boorishness or violence - but Linus and Alan Cox never got this level of treatment. Not even Hans Reiser for his obtuseness, nor Bruce Perens for his ability to scrap in an argument.
They are (or were in the case of Reiser) leaders in the community, Poettering is not is lambasted for going against the status quo. Just look at the abuse Torvalds dishes out and as a leader in the open source community his followers emulate him. I'm certainly not saying what Poettering does is any good but you can certainly see why open source has stagnated.
Being a part of the open source community means towing the line, if not then this community sees that sort of abusive behavior as acceptable. It isn't about working together, it's about hurling vitriol at anybody who's ideas you don't like or you disagree with (and that's ok because Linus does it). This is the reason open source has become a slow-follower rather than an innovator, nobody wants to be a part of a community like that.
people who tailgate are complete dangerous wankers so thats a stupid analogy.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
> Most of his haters are misguided luddites who are too obessed with the past, and cannot look towards the future.
Most of his haters are well informed old timers who are too well versed in what works, and sound engineering principles to be blinded by mindless and poorly architected futurism
Make no mistake: systemd integration is a textbook example of antidemocratic approaches, of how the commons can be soiled by a very small minority of the people using it.
So how is it there isn't enough manpower to maintain a fork with init rather than systemd? On the one hand you claim it's too much work to not use systemd but then simultaneously say systemd is pushed by a minority.
You seriously see a contradiction there? That a core part of a larger system has a new dependency, meaning that one is suddenly put in the position of considering whether it's more pain to keep it than to undo the damage? That this same core part could have been written by a very small group of people who have a track record of not playing nicely with the other children?
... Because if you can't even conceive of the nature of the problem, there's no point at all in responding to the rest of your quibbles.
As a gendankenexperiment, imagine one valve of your heart deciding it wants to change its rhythm. The others can choose to remain as they were, or adopt the new rhythm. Right and wrong are only peripherally part of the decision; what matters first and foremost is not falling out of step. The other components can reason all they like, but if the recalcitrant one doesn't budge, they're stuck either accepting the ultimatum or taking radical steps. The rest of the body parts are, for all intents and purposes, just along for the ride, no matter how the decision affects them.
And that, my child, is the choice the Debian had foisted on them.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Unfortunately, yes they do. Unless you want to switch to BSD, or roll your own distribution
If so many distributions, including several major ones (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, etc.) are ALL switching to systemd (and before that to network manager and pulseaudio), and some of them since quite some time (openSUSE has been using it for 4 iterations) without switching back, and some are even eager to jump in as start using future project from the same source (Google has expressed interests in KDBUS), there might be 2 explanations:
- either Lennart is an Evil-Über-Wizard-Super-Mutant who is mastering the art of mass mind-control, and it forcing every distro to switch using hypnosis.
- or maybe, perhaps systemd is actually USEFUL, solves real-world problems (to the point that most distribution have decided to use it), and isn't as problematic as the detractor want you to believe (don't base your opinion on what the first beta was years ago). Some of purported evils of systemd have no base in reality (detractors tend to forget that systemd is not only PID1, but a whole constellation of helper softwares and daemons).
Systemd might have enough objective qualities, so that even if a very vocal minority doesn't agree with it, a silent majority has considered interesting enough to give it a try.
Also, online I hear a lot of people complaining about systemd and calling for boycott, but I see very few actual useful work:
- Gentoo *DID* write their own init system (OpenRC).
- Uselessd is an attempt at an alternative using as few components as possible.
- SystemBSD is an attempt to offer the same API but rewritten from scratch for BSD (so Gnome and other software which relies on systemd can run there).
But outside of there 3 exceptions, it's basically only people complaining and whining, and not much effort to actually avoid systemd and propose another alternative.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's the law in Illinois, too.
I see that, too, and I think in many cases it's drivers trying to stay out of the right lane that's been beat up by overweight trucks.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Yes, keep driving the speed limit.....in the right lane you fucking dipshit. Get the fuck out of the left lane like the damn driver's manual you never read clearly states. If you aren't going fast enough to pass anyone you've got no business over there you sanctimonious Bastard.
Come back with your rant when Poettering's crap is not being forced down the throats of users of most major distros, and when the company he works for ceases to wield great influence over what eventually becomes accepted standard in the community. Nobody is forcing me to use Windows either, but I use Linux over it for the freedom Linux offers. Yet it's starting to become more of a "You're only free to do these things if you want to use our more popular distro. Piss off if you don't like it". I know I could always try and gather some like minded people and start yet another distro, but when software vendors will only support the major distros and their offerings won't work on your incompatible OS, you have no choice but to fall at the feet of the those you disagree with. Significant alterations to basic software is not synonymous with "scratching an itch".
He's a prima donna who thinks he knows more than what a few million developers and sysadmins have learnt since before he was a zygote.
He also makes it clear he wants to toss POSIX out the window in favour of "whatever I decide is best", which doesn't sit well with lots of folks. Including me.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.