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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.
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.
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!
Actually, while working at Intel, I saw quite a few scenarios where hot-plugging of hardware is a critical requirement for long-uptime servers. Think adding storage, additional networking interfaces, and - for cPCI chassis - telecom interface cards. With systems that need to stay up all the time - and expand capacity - hot-swap is a great feature.
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.
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.
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 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..."
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.