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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."
"If you've done something to trigger my just world fallacy, maybe you deserve it"
He's just butt-hurt that Gentoo won't make systemd it's default init manager.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
In a "civil" world this is how things should work.
Statement:I think this technical solution is better.
Reply: No and here is the reason why.
In a world where "civil has descended to the Jr. High level.
Statment: You morons are doing it wrong.
Reply: You're an idiot.
In a world that is terribly out of control.
Reply: A threat of violence and or sexual assault.
That is never justified. And frankly that is what is happening here.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Who says he's "earned" it. I can't say I've been targeted by a group of trolls online, but I was bullied growing up. The bullies followed me in groups around taunting me and blocking my entrance to class. (If I passed just one of them in the hall, they would leave me alone.) I didn't do anything to them. The reason they did all this was because they found it fun to do. It was a sick sense of humor that never once considered that their target might be an actual human with actual feelings. (They stopped when someone else confronted them with the fact that their daily torments were actually doing damage to me. I was becoming increasingly paranoid and withdrawn.)
Decades later, I was targeted online by a lone troll who saw herself as a prophet of god. What did I do to her? Well, I liked photography and another of her targets liked photography so, in her twisted mind, this meant we were the same person and I was lying about everything when I said I wasn't. She harassed me online as much as she could, including threatening to file police reports on me to report me for horrible crimes. Granted, from what I could glean from her rantings, her view of "filing a police report" likely involved e-mailing the precinct to tell them god told her X committed Y crimes and thinking that they would immediately arrest X. Still, it was scary to have someone stalking you like this.
In the latter case, this person stalked me less than she possibly could since I used a pseudonym for the account she targeted. The other guy used his real name and got his relatives and place of business attacked as well. Change one off-kilter person to a gang of people who think someone has committed some horrible crime (i.e. expressing an opinion contrary to the one they hold true) and who have the time and resources to track down everything about this person and you can see how some online communities can be scary places.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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?
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.
The real problem isn't that he writes such software. To each their own, everyone should be able to write anything they want without attacks. The problem is the distributions that insist on making his crap the new default!
Are you aware that you're helping to reinforce one of the points two comments up? And somehow, writing software that a group of people deem as bad means that you should be met with horrible physical tortures?
Nowhere did GP say anything about whether or not LP deserved the abuse. He offered counterexamples to GGP's assertion that LP writes "great software," which has had plenty of objective explanations as to its flaws. He said nothing about the person himself.
To be fair, Pulseaudio seems to work OK now, and something like it was needed.
Well, it definitely works... better than it used to.
I'm pretty sure it still holds some kind of record for being the only piece of software that every single distribution has a wiki entry for turning off.
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.
This right here.
I didn't know who this guy was, but now I see people listing a littany of things I either avoid, or grudgingly accept because its easier to do so than figure out what I have to do to rip it out and replace it and keep it out through updates.
Don't get me wrong, network manager works. I use it, but, whenever I have had an issue with it, I have generally found it to be far more of a time sink than its worth and very hard to make heads or tails out of if you need to get under the covers
Basically, it is, in many ways, very similar to the problems I had 13 years ago when I said "screw redhat, this debian system is cleaner and I can figure it out without the gui" . (of course I ended up having to learn for work anyway, so I guess the joke was on me...twice now)
That said.... my main disagreement with him is this idea that there is an "open source community". Its too big for "a community". That is like saying the "Eastern seaboard community has a bunch of assholes" or "boston has a lot of assholes", yup, all over the place.
I think he draws so much ire because of the visibility of his software. Its not a problem endemic to open source, you think closed source companies don't get nasty emails? Hell, I have SENT companies nasty emails about their software....maybe not death threats but, certainly some very choice metaphors about their general material makeup have certainly been given.
This is not "the community" this is "the public".
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
See, this, right here, is why people lose it when they deal with Lennart.
This is not a matter of 'like' or 'do not like'. If it were, we could tell Lennart his software sucks and move on. But no, he's so fucking clever he not only has to be right, he has to foist his rightness onto systems before it's anywhere near mature.
And then.... and then, to add insult to injury, he refuses to accept that integrating core software, which in his own words claims to offer a one-stop-shop for kernel-userland interaction, without extensive use in real world conditions, might reasonably be thought a little rash. No, he has to go and accuse the entire software establishment of bias, an unwillingness to change (without even beginning to address where that inclination comes from), and ultimately, of a simple lack of ability to see and accept just how fucking right he is.
Amazingly, astonishingly to abso-fucking-lutely no one, his actions give rise to more than a little rancour. And now he has the gall to say that he was right all along, that his opponents are irrational and that it's a problem with the rest of the world.
To which I can only reply: seek help.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Before systemd sprouted tendrils of dependency everywhere, I ignored it entirely. He had his little project and that was fine.
I really don't care what he wrote or didn't, but the political manipulation to force it into everything is highly objectionable.
So the real problem is his insistence on wiping every other init off the face of the Earth. If he will kindly knock it off, I will return to not caring what he does with his project.
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.
I think systems admins would care a lot less about systemd if it didn't take over a ton of other things beyond booting, to make gains on boot time, when that's something that a sysadmin should be doing rarely (and in a cloud infrastructure, once per instance). systemd is fine for the desktop. It's great software for that. My issue is with the project managers for the various major distros that make this the new normal going forward and sacrifice stability and tested software on the server side for the desktop.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
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.
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.
How would you feel if there were apparent force applied to make you use systemd, regardless of our opinion of it? Some of us perceive that that's the reality. Witness L.P.'s recent rants against Gentoo, which only offers systemd as an option, and not the default option.
I like to be a moderate too, but I don't like coercion.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'm also one of the people migrating to FreeBSD, and I'm not happy that I had to do so having 15 years invested in Debian as a user and developer. Not that I'm unhappy with FreeBSD, it's really very good. I'm unhappy with the fact that a small number of arrogant and abrasive people can steamroller in a large number of very controversial changes and in doing so removed many of the reasons I was using GNU/Linux in the first place. If the system has rapidly become something you find pleasure, satisfaction and utility in using and developing it, you're not going to continue using and developing it "just because", you're going to find something to replace it. And having to make that choice was not pleasant.