

Dear Lennart, the FOSS community is not evil – it depends on you - telmich
http://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/attitude-of-the-foss-community-a-matter-of-perspective/

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vezzy-fnord
I too thought Lennart's diatribe was a little awkward. It's not that Lennart
didn't have valid concerns (though I personally think all this drama over
Linus is getting cliched), but he just seemed to have a total lack of self-
awareness. Imagine if Ulrich Drepper wrote a rant on sloppy management back
when he was still maintaining glibc. He may or may not have been correct, but
it'd be very hypocritical if he didn't acknowledge that to an extent, he's a
part of the problem.

Moreover, some of his examples left me unconvinced. I could only find one
petition sardonically suggesting for him to stop developing "useless"
software, however... another counter-petition later ended up emerging in his
support ([https://www.change.org/p/lennart-poettering-continue-
writing...](https://www.change.org/p/lennart-poettering-continue-writing-
useful-programs)). In addition, Ulrich Drepper has received _plenty_ of bug
reports that all scolded his behavior, and even Linus Torvalds was the subject
of a petition concerning removing RdRand from /dev/random. Point is:
controversial people are controversial.

He then goes on to mention the website about boycotting systemd. It's fairly
obvious that systemd is a highly controversial piece of software, so arguments
against it are expected. I agree that the presentation is pretty off-putting
and confrontational, but I didn't see any "personal attacks".

However, the part about hiring a hitman through Bitcoin _really_ caught my
attention. That does sound awful, so I decided to look into it a bit.

As it turns out, the story is actually much more tame. What happened was that
a few Maemo developers on IRC were angry over the Consistent Network Device
Naming feature of udev, trash talked a bit and then went on to different
technical topics. After some irrelevant fare, the topic was raised again with
the timestamps between 18:21:51 and 20:04:59.

There is no grand plot to kill Lennart. In fact, the word "Bitcoin" was
mentioned only once. It's a bunch of developers acting facetious and trash
talking, and it's all absolutely baseless. I have no idea why Lennart brought
it up. Logs can be found here:
[http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.tx...](http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.txt)

Ultimately, I think the whole thing is blown out of proportion, and what
worries me is that all this will pretty much end up silencing criticism of
systemd even further.

