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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."
Most of what he's complaining about is undeserved (hiring a hit on him, WTF?) but he's not exactly known to be very diplomatic in his communications. He is, with a heavy hand, changing the fundamental landscape of a lot of people's favorite OS. This is upsetting people, in a big way in some cases. Again, constructive criticism is the way to handle dislike of systemd and his other projects, not death threats or even simple, juvenile insults.
But he shares some of the blame when it comes to the vitriolic nature of systemd discussions. He can't just brush off a large percentage of the community and not expect people to get upset.
What blows my mind is that every single major distribution seems to be hopping on the systemd bandwagon. I'm looking squarely at Debian. The short time systemd (relatively speaking) has been around and has been worked on and debugged does not justify it's inclusion in a system that's known for stability and correctness over latest/greatest.
Oh well, for me it was the kick in the head I needed to finally getting around to 100% embracing *BSD as a server system and not as something to play around with in my free time.
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The key difference between non-corporate open source projects and Microsoft or Apple is that companies have HR departments. Problem employees can be dealt with or even fired.
There isn't really an analog in your typical open source community. In fact, smaller open source projects tend to be so grateful for any help that asshole behavior is tolerated -- or even considered the norm. It's a sad state of affairs for the majority of us who want to contribute, but have no interest in dealing with a cesspool of assholes.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
This post has been a long time in the making, as Leonart is easily the most hated programmer in Free software, despite being one of the more competant and forward thinking of the bunch, he pulls a disproporiate amount of hate until he has become a running joke. Most of his haters are misguided luddites who are too obessed with the past, and cannot look towards the future.
I am supprised we haven't seen anything like this previous, and I don't know how the man deals with just being leonart poettering.
He's defiling everything we hold dear.
Are you sure he doesn't work for Microsoft?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Yet people could happily live on without hating him or his software if the distros (and certain mammoth software projects) didn't force-feed us with his creations.
I still don't quite know what problems pulseaudio or systemd are trying to solve, that hasn't already been solved some other way.
Why would they want it? It's setting itself up as a single point of failure and breaks POSIX compliance.
That's like asking "Why doesn't FreeBSD just use the Windows bootloader?"
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THANK GOD!!!
I'm okay w/ systemd. I don't consider myself an enabler. I use Linux for my day to day work. Whatever the kernel guys put in is fine by me. If it breaks my workflow, I look for something else. That's how I switched from Ubuntu to Mint.
There are plenty of FOSS OSs out there. I don't care about the internals of them. I care about the apps they run so I can get my work done.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Systemd was picked up because distro package maintainers spend a lot of time maintaining and tweaking initscripts which are custom for each distro. Unit-files can be maintained upstream and shared by all distro's, this frees up man hours to do other things. That is why distros picked it up. Init should have been declarative A LONG FUCKING TIME AGO. It isnt' potterings fault he's the first to do it semi competently and the distro's jumped at it.
I happen to know a bit - if not a fair amount - about the advantages and drawbacks of plain-text vs binary formats for I/O, and the brittleness of dependencies that are expressed through binary formats vs. parsing text.
The beauty and glory and travesty that are *NIX are living testimony to this. The trail of RSTS/E, MVS, VMS, DOS, MacOS, Windows.last and Android.next all demonstrate why POSIX-style systems, built on the "do one thing well" philosophy, with mostly human-readable text-based IO have longevity and are the leveragable core technology under most, more transient, graphical user shells.
SystemD is an abortion. It appeals to RedHat - who stacked the deck and manipulated the governing process to have it adopted by Debian. If they want an OS built like that? They can license the VMS sources and make their OWN copy of NT.
Hooks that fuckup a system, tying init to specific libraries and specific builds of individual device initialization and volume mapping schemes are a step back into darkness - and a cult of experts with necessary commercial funding. This is the breakdown of Open Source vs Free Software from a movement/philosophical POV.
The result of a Linux kernel tied to SystemD and PulseAudio approaches is similar to that of Android - where meaningful work is done by arcane parts of a system that relegates kernel function to the most undifferentiated commodity tasks, and source availability is almost irrelevant - because changes and fixes occur through closed processes, against a code base that is inaccessibly dense and full of binary dependency.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm missing part (ok, the vast majority) of this story, but if his software is such shit, then why are so many distros, who presumably enjoy when their operating systems run correctly, using his software? Is there actually a consensus on his software being shit, and if so, why do people use it? If not, why do people act like it's a foregone conclusion that his software is shit? To an outside observer this kind of looks like a shouting match amongst a huge group of egotistical assholes.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black