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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."
He deserves to work for Microsoft.
The same abusive jerk has been after me too. Through some savvy detective work, I figured out his real first name: "Linus"
As soon as I determine his last name I'm going to lay down some serious vengeance upon his ass!
"If you've done something to trigger my just world fallacy, maybe you deserve it"
people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more.
I know how you feel, 4chan has destroyed much more than open source, it has destroyed my entire peaceful suburban neighborhood, now my neighbor has decorated his little car with a HUGE Pedo Bear decal all over the car, and no one so far - have reacted to this.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
He's just butt-hurt that Gentoo won't make systemd it's default init manager.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
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.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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'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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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!
Does Pulseaudio give anything that ALSA doesn't now?
Yes.
Non-deterministic latency.
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.
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 get it. Sometimes your "s" key works, sometimes it produces a "*". Maybe you'd better get your keyboard fixed.