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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."
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.
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!
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.
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.