
Lennart Poettering on the state of open source communities - omnibrain
https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/J2TZrTvu7vd
======
exDM69
I'm very grateful that Lennart Poettering wrote this post. I don't necessarily
use the software he writes (my next distro will be systemd based) but I'm
still happy that he writes it. It has advanced the state of Linux
distributions (due to PulseAudio, lots of ALSA driver bugs were found and
fixed, systemd has prompted improvements to other
init/acpid/udev/automount/etc software too) regardless whether you use the
software he wrote or not.

But the amount of flak he receives is unacceptable. The tone which people talk
about him and even _to_ him is despicable.

I'm glad he spoke up and hopefully people will realize that open source
contributors are people too. If you have a _technical_ reason to disagree,
taking it personal is not constructive.

~~~
laumars
I don't advocate bullying nor would I dare to justify such personal attacks.
But the abusive content aside, he does deserve _constructive_ criticism
because, frankly, his contributions towards open source have brought far more
problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace.

I could write a lengthy blog post about the unnecessary problems that
PulseAudio and systemd have thrown up over the years (problems I'd never had
an issue with in all the years of running Linux and other UNIX-like
platforms), but those topics are done to death now. However my point is I
think Lennart's been so carelessly cavalier in rolling out his code, and so
unapologetic about the shitstorm he started that he's gotten a lot of peoples
back up. Obviously this doesn't warrant the kind of bullying that he discussed
in his post; however although he doesn't deserve such attacks, he has largely
brought them on himself.

Maybe instead of fighting against the community as he tries to impose his own
imperial vision of Linux, maybe if he worked with the community then the
aggressive dickheads might leave him alone (or at least he'd receive more
supporters from friendly folk - of who massively outnumber the aforementioned
dickheads).

But just to be clear, as much as I think he might draw negative attention to
himself, I think that any kind of personal abuse, let alone of the quantity
that Lennart's been subject to, is absolutely disgusting and undeserved.
Period.

~~~
csirac2
I agree with most of your post. His attitude toward keyscript users is less
than inspiring. But I still try - yesterday I spent 4 hours tweaking my VM
builds against debian sid; by the end I had found a way to segfault systemctl,
filed a bug, and still have absolutely no debugging info that explains why
docker.service doesn't start at boot on its default network.target.

But the elephant in the room is that distros have adopted systemd and
pulseaudio en masse. There must be buy-in for a reason. This outpouring of
faux outrage is being leveled at an individual, what of the distro vendors?

~~~
VLM
"There must be buy-in for a reason."

Never forget chronology. The ideas and architecture in systemd are nothing
new, in fact they're kind of obsolete. What has changed politically /
strategically such that this specific instance can be rammed down everyones
unwilling throats?

Lets run a thought experiment about if this hatred is a result of technical
actions and behaviors or back room politics. Lets try... the upstart init
system. A direct competitor. How many people have threatened to kill the
authors of upstart? Oh, none you say? What a complete non-surprise.

This is the key weakness of his post. Hatred of authors of badly architected
software is very rare in open source. Hatred of back room political dealings
and extensive "embrace extend extinguish" product tying, well the feeling of
hatred is completely unsurprising given that behavior being the opposite of
the meritocracy straw dog he tries to tear down, but some claimed behavior
does sound over the top (hire a hitman? really? a bit ridiculous if true). He
could have made a decent post about misbehavior and over-reaction in politics
and it would have been a correct and good post, but he can't admit in public
the corrupt way an unwanted systemd is being shoved down our unwilling
throats, so we end up with ridiculous "I am a technical guy" LOL yeah as if
anyone believes the reported social problems are due to that.

~~~
ldng
You are spot on. As you said, Upstart probably never received death threats. I
also agree the post could hae been a decent post because there are definitely
some problems in some communities but he couldn't even resist gunning at Linus
and Gentoo to make a point (or was that to discredit "resistance" ?)

------
seba_dos1
It's rather "Lennart Poettering on how communities react to him". He's very
controversial person and it's not like he didn't earned that title by himself.
Of course stuff like death threats cannot and shouldn't be justified in any
way (however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with
highly controversial topics), but things like petitions are just hyperbolic
opinions on Poettering's work and on how it affects all of us.

Poettering is no longer mere "technical guy" from "technical community". He's
more like political figure, and political figures have to deal with various
political reactions.

~~~
mercurial
> however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with
> highly controversial topics

Come on. We're talking about init systems here, not the Palestine/Israel
conflict. It should be possible to have a level-headed discussion without
insults and death threats. Saying "Poettering is a prominent, controversial
person, therefore it's OK" isn't right.

~~~
chronid
Small correction: we are not talking about init systems. We are talking about
the change from a "distributed" userspace to a "centralized" one. It's an
highly political debate while also being technical. Tempers are gonna flare.

~~~
Argorak
Go to your local town hall and threaten to kill the mayor because you don't
like his opinions/work. Try to explain all your neighbors that that was okay,
because "Tempers are gonna flare".

This is, by the way, an offense you can end in jail for, for good reasons.

~~~
ginko
Only that the open source community is a lot larger than your local town, so
it's natural that you will get more extreme cases in the fringes.

I'm quite sure the mayor of New York gets death threats on a regular basis.

~~~
Argorak
That might be the case in the US, but not everywhere.

~~~
Crito
You think people like Boris Johnson don't receive the occasional death threat?
Laughable.

------
mrottenkolber
Death threats aside (violence it just silly, please stop it?)... How many
persons managed to acquire the amount of hate Poettering did? Jup, not many.

From my experience the OSS community can be quite dismissive of people who
ignore prior art. Its a protective shield against bad design. You can not
write good software as a large group by accepting people who fumble too bad.
It's ok to submit a patch with a bug, its ok if the first implementation isn't
any good. But when you have people who consistently push bad design, at some
point it will slip through and the next generation of engineers as to deal
with someones bad idea. Thus a conservative stance makes sense when it comes
to APIs and architectures.

Now I know Poettering mainly for PulseAudio and systemd, both systems I really
don't care for. My distribution of choice doesn't ship those, so I don't
really have any gripes with him, but the fact that he is backed by a large
vendor (RedHat?) is scary.

 _Imagine_ systemd/PulseAudio/whatever-to-come will be pushed into the "Linux
core" by corporate pressure, funding etc.

How will I explain to my children that they are stuck with shitty-software-X?
"Sorry son, there is no technical merit, its an ambitious guy's fault who was
backed by RedHat."

I am already stuck with ALSA, if getting into a mud fight would help to avoid
future clusterfucks, you could count me in. I don't think it helps though, so
there is really no point in flaming the dude. Instead I suggest to use all
this energy to discredit/control/QA his work on a scientific level.

~~~
antocv
If you dont want to tell your children that they are stuck with shitty-
software-X.

What mrottenkolber, is stopping _you_ from being an ambitious guy who writes
non-shitty-software?

Write better tools, and software than Poettering, and leave him alone to write
his.

Nobody is actually forcing you to use any of his software, no not even Redhat
or any other distribution, this is free and open source software, you havent
payed for anything, you are free to use whatever software you wish.

You have a problem with Poetterings software? _Do not use that software_.

How fucking hard is that?

~~~
ginko
>What mrottenkolber, is stopping you from being an ambitious guy who writes
non-shitty-software?

>Write better tools, and software than Poettering, and leave him alone to
write his.

The general perception is that Poetterig is able to push his software thanks
to his position at Red Hat instead of its technical merits.

~~~
antocv
Why dont you get a position at RedHat or make your own company.

------
notacoward
Take a group of ill-tempered, aggressive bears. Walk among them wearing a suit
made of salmon. Not going to end well.

Much of what Lennart says about the kernel community is true. Much of what
they say about him is also true. While he might stay away from invective and
hyperbole, the underlying contempt and dismissiveness of reasonable concerns
is still there. This is one fight where nobody in their right mind would want
to support either side.

------
sudowhodoido
Circa 2002-2006 I was quite active in the Linux community I.e. I contributed
some code to a few GNU projects and a couple of kernel patches to solve
problems that were, quite selfish really. But hey it turns out it wasn't just
me or my company so I thought I'd contribute them. They solved real problems
to be honest (driver bugs and crashes).

Having been on the end of a chunk of hate for about 40% of my work simply on
political grounds rather than any technical grounds, I can understand this
entirely and I have no problem with Lennart at all on this basis. I'm talking
about patches, not reengineering either.

The basic problem was raising a defect "X doesn't work properly, here's a
tested fix that we deployed in production". The answer was ticket closed. I
reopened, and asked for an explanation. Literally "get fucked, we don't want
your 'fix'". I replied "I'll patch my own kernel and SRPMS then" followed by a
massive lecture from one of the project leaders on how I should be
communicating with the community and that I need to be part of the special
circle jerk club on that project to get a patch in. The defects were even
removed from the trackers if the community members were rude to the outsiders
to hide the fact.

So out of the goodness of my own heart I wasted 5 days with GDB debugging
shit, wrote a patch that fixed it and raised a ticket with the patch attached,
was closed, BANG. This happened 4 times on different projects.

So yes I do find that a number of the higher profile projects are purely
powered by liquid asshole.

Unfortunately that makes me want to rely on the platforms less and has made me
shift my focus to the Windows and BSD platforms which are surprisingly less
political.

Argh. I even hated writing this.

------
flohofwoe
I don't know much of the drama around systemd, but this sounds like a typical
"everyone's an asshole except me" post. First, he's shooting a broadside
against all Open Source communities, but it all seems to be about 'I don't
agree with Linus'. To me the Linux community seems to be quite successful in
quickly identifying and kicking out destructive assholes and drama queens
which don't help solve problems but only create new ones, otherwise Linux
wouldn't be in the state it is.

~~~
Argorak
For me, it sounds more like an "that weird, abusive shit people talk about?
It's real!"-post.

He does, for example, admit that he did not always live up to those standards
he wants.

~~~
flohofwoe
Sure, but why is he specifically calling Open Source communities 'sick places'
when this happens everywhere else too, including the real world outside the
internet?

~~~
ben0x539
"Why doesn't he address all other evils in the world before the one I feel
defensive about? The hypocrite!"

It's probably because he specifically works in and identifies with the larger
open source community, and because people who (pretend to?) collect money to
get him killed specifically identify with the open source community too.

------
chris_wot
Not every open source community. The LibreOffice community is very positive
and encouraging. The codebase needs lots of refactoring, but we are all in
this together and we are getting results! And we are doing it by being _nice_
to one another.

Frankly, I don't think we'd get any momentum if we didn't.

~~~
mercurial
Yes, I agree that the atmosphere and the rules enforced differ between
communities. It's also true that the Linux kernel community is known for its
strong language and personal attacks (the last time I remember it being
featured prominently on HN and elsewhere was when Sarah Sharp called out Linus
on his behaviour [1]). But maybe LKML feels like it needs drama from time to
time?

1: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634](https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634)

~~~
_delirium
Most of the particularly vicious flak Poettering gets isn't even really from
the Linux kernel community, but just from random internet people who have an
opinion. There's traditionally a bit of an expectation of a "meritocracy of
code" in LKML where you can't yell too loudly if you don't also contribute
(not necessarily literally "code", also documentation, testing, code review,
hardware specs, etc.). I think the degree to which it's an idealized
meritocracy can easily be overstated, but it does tend to at least raise the
bar for ranting, since you can't _only_ rant without ever doing anything else.
The general internet doesn't really feel constrained by that, so you have
people who know next to nothing about the Linux kernel who nevertheless feel
entitled to very strong and intemperately expressed opinions about it.

~~~
sqrt17
This is pretty much it: Linus Thorvald telling people to go screw themselves
is an argument of "I am widely recognized to have the loudest voice because of
many useful contributions, now accept my opinion or go away".

This carries the danger of people shortening it into "I have the loudest
voice" in their mind, which begs the question how other communities unite the
role of "last instance for contentious questions" (aka benevolent dictator)
with the ideal of being nice to everyone.

~~~
_delirium
Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this
architecture is shit" than "you're shit". They can be taken personally (and
imo are sometimes over the top), but they don't seem intended in a more
vicious way as trying to "hit" a particular person. When he does criticize
people it ends up being pretty measured, e.g. a widely talked about blog post
where he "attacks" RMS [1] is not a flame at all, but just him saying he isn't
a huge fan of RMS and thinks RMS is a bit of a single-issue, black-and-white
type of person. Which is a personal criticism, but a pretty civil one. And he
definitely doesn't stoop to starting campaigns to try to drive people out of
the open-source community who he doesn't like; he just works with them or
doesn't.

[1] [http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-
white....](http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html)

~~~
anon1385
>Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this
architecture is shit" than "you're shit".

I don't see how it gets much more personal than starting off a mail to a new
contributor with the line:

    
    
      *YOU* are full of bullshit.
    

Even the supposed 'meat' of the argument was a thinly veiled personal insult:

    
    
      Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
    

[http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus](http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus)

~~~
vacri
Nothing like a good old cherry-picked fiery comment out of the thousands of
public messages Torvalds posts. Not to mention that you've sizably
mischaracterised the 'meat' of his argument - which I find more offensive than
hearing someone called 'full of BS' followed by an explanation.

------
dimman
I'm not defending shitty bevaiour at all (and taking it to a personal level
such as killing people, thats just insane). Having said that, I'm not
surprised though that the shitstorm is hitting systemd (and Lennart
Poettering) perhaps most of all.

My observation of whats happening is quite frankly that people do not like the
enforcing approach of systemd. There is no humble approach, it's the systemd
approach and don't stand in the way.

~~~
ben0x539
> (and taking it to a personal level such as killing people, thats just
> insane)

It's not "insane". It's a thing people do because they get the impression that
it's socially acceptable, because see, everybody sympathizes with people
griping about systemd, right? Everybody agrees that Poettering is the devil,
right? He's bringing it on himself by sneaking into people's houses and
installing systemd on their computers, right?

It's not insane. It doesn't stem from some imbalance in brain chemistry or
some other mental issue. Labeling it insanity belies the community's
responsibility for setting standards of acceptable behavior.

~~~
dimman
If people take it to the level of actually murdering him, then yes, it's
insane.

~~~
XorNot
It's hardly an OSS problem though. It's practically a "western society and the
internet" problem. Death threats are probably less common now then they were
in the early anonymity days of the net, but conversely they're a lot less
mundane.

But this a problem which turns up in _every_ community where there are
politicized issues. See: anything to do with women talking about video games.

We can take this problem even wider and start looking at say, American
domestic politics and it's infatuation with "second amendment solutions". It's
apparently socially acceptable to drop that phrase when discussing elections,
policy and the president when you're a state or federal representative.
Locally in Australia we've got an entire political party that carefully fans
the flames of almost but not quite encouraging violence and intolerance.

You can certainly improve things at a community-by-community level, and OSS
definitely should try to do so (and there should be support to do so in
sensible, constructive ways). But this is a problem which goes _a lot_ further
then software development.

~~~
ben0x539
It's certainly a problem in a wider scope than just software development, and
not really inherent to software development at all, but I think it manifests
in open source communities in a particularly insidious way. Everybody thinks
they're philosophically on the right side anyway, they're too smart for
prejudice and too useful a community member to possibly be part of the
problem.

Also I figure people rely on meritocracy being some sort of infallible system,
in some sort of just-world fallacy where they figure if this guy who's
screaming bloody murder on the mailing list were wrong to do so, surely
someone would have stopped him, right...? But he's got all these patches in
the tree, so that means he's correct by definition, and that's more important
than "real-life" social norms anyway.

------
rdsubhas
Before we throw any more hate again, here's what I understand:

* Most Linux-based OSS communities (specially the kernel) market themselves as a Merry Community

* In reality, they're not, they're full of bullies who won't hesistate to call you or your mother names

* You must equally be a bully enough if you want to stand on your own

And I relate with this a lot. Bullies act like this in groups, and they always
feel extremely proud and righteous of themselves, and think they're doing
God's Work. But beyond all that overflowing sense of righteousness, bullying
is simply, plainly, wrong.

Unfortunately, most of these Linux-based communities have grown to become
bands of bullies, and they are also extremely proud of it. Such a sad
situation to be in. Folks who call themselves "Freedom-loving FOSS members"
behaving in polar opposite to the values that they supposedly care about. Some
things are just unacceptable.

~~~
sqrt17
IMO, you misunderstand some of it:

"communities are full of bullies who won't hesitate to call you or your mother
names" \- I think this is best put as "doing controversial things will attract
trolls and haters".

"you must equally be a bully enough" \- no, you just need to tune out the
haters and continue to work towards your goal.

Lennart and the others underwent a ginormous effort to grow systemd from a
borderline dangerous "I'm smarter than everyone else" toy project into
something that's actually useful.

They did that despite the fact that the problem in question had been solved a
couple times over (upstart was the last in a series of "improved" versions of
SysVInit), and despite the fact that systemd adoption incurs a large switching
cost of re-writing init scripts for all packages.

The art of leading a successful open source project is partly in tuning in to
useful feedback and tuning out the haters who have nothing to contribute. Yes,
the haters function based on ways that are similar to bullying. But while you
can keep them off the mailing list, you can't ban them everywhere.

The more visible a community or an undertaking, the more visible it is for
haters and bullies, and the more effort is lost on policing them or tuning
them out. There's no way around it, other than educating the general
population or staying a small, very technical in-group.

~~~
inclemnet
> the problem in question had been solved a couple times over

This seems a bit disingenous. Unless you think upstart is literally perfect,
the problem is obviously not solved, only iterated on...and without further
arguments there's no reason systemd shouldn't attempt to be the next (further
improved) iteration.

Systemd certainly has features upstart doesn't, some of which are prominent
arguments for its adoption. So it seems the community doesn't agree - no,
upstart is not the pinnacle of init systems.

~~~
sqrt17
BSD init is certainly not the pinnacle of init systems. rc.d-based SysV init
isn't either. upstart also has its warts.

For some people, BSD init works just fine and they're happy with it and they
abhor the additional complexity. Without any doubt, Systemd also has its flaws
- it's not compatible with *BSDs, or generally non-Linux systems, it's a
departure from the "everything is accessible using a simple text editor"
principle that has brought Linux where we're now, and there's a non-zero
switching cost for each and every package.

Many people know polipo-audio (later renamed to pulseaudio) and the crashing
propensity of its earlier versions, and who are kind of intimidated by the
whole DBus/ConsoleKit tangle that introduces many moving components that are
hard to debug when they fail. A system that is "perfect in theory" but crashes
often is not that great.

So people are kind of apprehensive when the same guy who brought them crashing
sound demons a couple years ago now comes over happily with a solution to
replace the most central component for their system. Thus far, I've been
pleasantly surprised by Systemd silently doing its thing and working as
advertised. And I wouldn't swap it out for upstart if someone gave me the
choice.

The morale? Yes, people grow up, complex systems become more manageable with
time when people write debugging aids for them. (Including things such as
VirtualBox which make debugging central system components much easier -
imagine living in a world where your systemd crashes and bugs simply get
closed with a WORKSFORME tag and ignored).

~~~
digi_owl
Also, with consolekit you could use any number of inits. Drop logind on top of
anything but systemd and it will simply refuse to function.

Meaning that if any of the older inits balk you can bring up the system
piecemeal manually and get to town figuring out why it balked.

There are a number of experiences documented on G+ and forums of systemd
getting into a deadlock, with no useful error messages, and where it can't be
brought up piecemeal for diagnosis as everything relies on systemd running as
pid1.

That is the kind of boot time Russian roulette that MS products have been
lambasted for in the past.

------
metafex
Yes, Open Source communities can be bad. But there are also good ones. And if
you think Linus is bad, read some comments from Theo de Raadt.

The first opensource project I tried to contribute to when I started coding
has been a horrible experience. When I asked about some directions regarding
some details, the only responses I got were not nice, to say the least. f.i.
they complained that i mixed british and american english, and that was the
most constructive response. Well, stuff like that can happen if your 13, from
austria and never had a proper english-teacher before ;-)

OTOH there are also the good experiences where people help each other out and
aren't afraid to teach someone how things work. there are a lot of good FOSS
communities out there.

For me personally the guys around the Aboriginal Linux project stand out. They
have been really helpful on IRC and the ML is also refreshing to read :)

------
1ris
>The Linux community is dominated by western, white, straight, males in their
30s and 40s these days. I perfectly fit in that pattern, and the rubbish they
pour over me is awful.

Maybe you are the problem. I don't know a single OSS developer that is more
hated than you. Ever wondered why this might be?

~~~
IshKebab
It's because he implicitly and explicitly points out the very real flaws in
desktop linux. And then he has the audacity to try and fix things by
_changing_ them!

If there's one thing people hate more than having flaws pointed out in
something they like, it's someone else changing that thing and making it
better. Not only does it feel like an insult, but it means that all that pain
you went through to learn bash/xfree86.conf/ifconfig/alsactl/etc. is now
irrelevant.

I don't see how you can seriously argue against systemd. The lack of
integration and modernity in desktop linux _has_ hurt it. Does no-one remember
how much of a pain in the arse it was to simply connect to a WPA2 wifi network
for __years __? That was because wifi configuration was a jumbled assortment
of (really secure no doubt) shell scripts - not something that is easy to
interface to a GUI. We should be celebrating the fact that someone is fixing
the mess that is the linux userspace.

Anyway, none of this justifies the stupid amount of hatred inflicted on him.
And I've still yet to see a sane technical criticism of systemd.

~~~
makomk
Actually, the main problem with wifi on Linux was that the drivers were crap
and there were a bunch of competing WiFi stacks with mutally-incompatible
APIs. If you had a decent driver, connecting to an access point and
authenticating was - and still is - handled entirely by a small, single-
purpose monolithic program called wpa_supplicant. The "jumbled assortment of
(really secure no doubt) shell scripts" didn't need to know or care whether
your network was WPA2. All they had to do was start wpa_supplicant and wait
for it to tell them it had connected. Most of the complexity and issues came
from older, incompatible drivers with their own built-in WPA supplicants (or
no WPA support at all) that aren't supported anymore.

------
monochr
And Mr. Poettering should know all about being an obnoxious asshole:
[http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s](http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s)

~~~
pantalaimon
Why is that video always brought forward? Datenwolf obviously has no clue what
he's talking about and Lennart tells him where he is wrong.

~~~
nisa
Datenwolf looks at the problems from the sysadmin perspective and all he is
seeing and complaining about is complexity that introduces hard to debug
problems and bugs. Sure his criticism is derided by Lennart as he has far more
intimate knowledge about the software. However 'Did you file a bug?' and 'Do
you hate disabled users?' actually are not helping here either.

It's complicated and modern Desktop Linux userland
(ConsoleKit/PolKit/dbus/pulseaudio/GNOME...) feels like a sub-optimal solution
from a sysadmin perspective. Maybe systemd will fix some of these issues but
some are afraid it will introduce others.

Having dealt with "modern Desktop Linux" I can totally relate to Datenwolf. I
understand that he lacks knowledge but if you are not a developer of these
systems it's impossible to deal with this mess. And yes - I think it's largely
a undocumented, poorly implemented and overly complex mess.

~~~
digi_owl
And that seems to be the eternal issue. Poettering seems to come at this not
from an admin perspective but from a developer perspective. And with RH
shifting their focus more and more towards cloud computing, so is systemd.

And in cloud computing the admins are not kings, but peons.

Peons tilling the cattle (server) farm of 100s of servers, each running any
number of VM instances. If one or more of those instances go down, new ones
are spun back up.

And you see this attitude within systemd. If a daemons crashes you don't leave
it down and try to figure out why it crashes. Instead systemd will simply
restart any daemon it finds not to be running when it should.

Basically this is not uptime by way of applying carefully measured and
maintained administration. This is uptime by machinegun.

It is what allows anyone with some grasp of php to rent server time on a
amorphous blob like the Amazon EC2 and spin up the next Twitter or Facebook.

No need to optimize for or maintain the hardware. If the current load is too
much, wave your credit card and have 1000 fresh instances behind the the load
balancer, courtesy of Amazon or RH.

Datenwolf is demonstrating the kind of exasperation that have in the past
driven people to look for alternatives to Windows. They thought they had found
the promised land in Linux, but now the blight is coming over the walls and
taking up residence even here.

------
jpswade
I know nothing about this man, so I decided to look him up...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversies)

"The "Poettering effect" is now sometimes used as a negative term for presumed
damage his mindset is doing to opensource communities."

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry-
pi/...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry-
pi/-02E5S4E6bI/NsFZgjv62yEJ)

I guess there's two sides to every story...

What a strange situation.

~~~
hyperpape
But notice that's all technical in nature--what he's discussing is abuse and
harassment. I don't know a lot about the context, but if he's right, those are
very different things--not really two sides at all.

~~~
jpswade
He says "Wow, what an awful community Linux has!". How is that "technical in
nature"?

~~~
hyperpape
No, the reasons people dislike him are primarily technical in nature: they
don't trust the things he creates. They respond by attacking him in a very
personal and abusive way.

That's not an issue that has two sides. That's an issue about his technical
work, and then some people doing something abusive. There's two sides to that
technical debate, but there's only one side to the other debate, and that's
"stop being awful." There would only be two sides if the technical issues
surrounding his work somehow justified the abuse. And they don't, because
basically nothing justifies that kind of abuse in the tech world.

The comment "Linux is an awful community" is not technical, but it came after
the abuse. Hopefully you can see that there's a difference between that and
threatening someone.

~~~
jpswade
"Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural
positions regarding the linux ecosystem"

It seems to read that he is basically going around systematically "upsetting
the applecart".

Now, whether he's doing that technically or otherwise, it's still having an
effect on the ecosystem. You can't detach yourself from that.

------
jiggy2011
The problem with "communities" that mainly exist online is that they are not
really communities at all, instead they are people scattered across different
websites with only the loosest of connections and absolutely no barrier to
entry whatsoever and there is no way with which people can be expelled.
Therefor it becomes easy for any online community to attract many people who
are more interested in the drama and tribalism that surrounds the community
than the goals of the community itself,. Posting "systemd sucks" (or more
personal things) is much lower effort than actually building an alternative to
systemd.

~~~
mercurial
There is nothing hard about kicking repeat offenders from an "official"
mailing list/subreddit/IRC channel for breaking community guidelines. You just
need to set up clear rules, explain them if needed, and expel people too thick
to follow the rules, and have enough moderators. Trolls may still complain on
other forums, but it will make the place much more liveable for people
actually interested in exchanging and contributing.

~~~
jiggy2011
In the article he talks about people posting stuff about him to other
websites, namely youtube , 4chan (or at least in 4chan "style") and petition
websites.

~~~
mercurial
Fair point. You can't really police the Internet. I had more in mind some
ridiculous overreactions that have happened in the past in various forums. But
you will always have the cowardly, usually anonymous abusers.

------
olgeni
Well, the "western, white, straight, male, blah, blah" rhetoric should at
least bring out some pavlovian support these days. Maybe it's time to replace
Linus as BDFL, and this could be a fine tactic too.

I stopped caring so long ago that I wasn't even hit by pulseaudio, so both
Lennart and Mr. Drepper have my sympathy and support, as long as they keep to
Linux (thankyouverymuch).

~~~
tux3
First they came for Linux, and I did not speak out— Because I was not using
Linux.

...

------
mappu
I don't think this problem is anything particular to open-source communities.
There's lots of popular software that is poorly received (Windows 8).

There's the software people hate, and the software nobody uses.

(Of course turning it into a personal attack is very poor behaviour.)

------
Wilya
Oh, come on.

Poettering wants to show how his community is nice and welcoming, and he does
it by... making gratuitous attacks at Gentoo? Sounds legit.

------
pdkl95
Any group of people that grows will eventually accumulate traits that resemble
humanity in general. This means that once a group is sufficiently large enough
it will probably contain some of the jerks, too. The proper response, of
course, is to ignore them unless you have evidence of some actual specific
threat which should be brought to the attention of law enforcement, not
complained about on the web. Any group that grows eventually has to deal with
these jerks, and most learn to just file the rant based "threats" to /dev/null
where they belong.

There is one data point you can possibly extract from the sudden appearance of
jerks ranting about your work: it is a rough heuristic that suggest that group
of people has grown "sufficiently large". People working in the arts sometimes
take this as a suggestion that they have "made it", as they have finally
achieved an audience that is large enough that touches on a diverse cross-
section of the population, and n not just their original niche.

So this suggest that the thing Mr. Poettering is complaining about... is that
the _people whgo oppose his software_ have become so large that _normal users_
from random parts of society are complaining. It is proof that it is not, as
many suggest, a small amount of unix beards[1] that are doing the complaining.

Mr. Poettering just needs to learn that when you make it big by trowing your
weight around - _especially_ when you deliver your own testosterone-fueled
challenges and insults - you are making yourself a target. This may or may not
be deserved, but if you want to survive in a world where assholes and jerks
still exist you need to learn to not take their insults too personally.

/* I'll point out that this general advice is true for anybody with a large
audience. If I were to reply to the long history of how systemd forced a coup
and hostile takeover of the linux community, then i might suggest that while
there area always assholes, this _does_ stink a bit like he's responding to a
situation nicely setup for him by some agent provocateur. It certainly fits
his cabal's historical style. _/

Edit; for the record, in no way am I _condoning* jerks that merely throw
around insults and threats. I am simply stating that they are inevitable once
your audience is big enough.

[1] myself included; also: [https://imgur.com/QWkbh](https://imgur.com/QWkbh)

------
anon4
Excuse me if I don't trust Lennart "all pulseaudio problems are
driver/application problems, get fucked" Poettering to tell me about online
communities.

~~~
zimpenfish
Your point might be better made if you weren't anonymous. Also if it had less
victim blaming.

~~~
jessaustin
Are you trying to win an irony award?

~~~
zimpenfish
That would only work if my username wasn't -astonishingly- easy to link back
to my real self. Not even 5 minutes of work.

------
elementai
Every time I see a similar submission on how bad FOSS communities are, I can't
help but wonder - what do we do about it then? People react violently not
always solely because of their nature, but also because they don't see a
reasonable way to change things. It probably would help better for Poettering
to write a post addressing systemd criticism, maybe there is one, but it never
made to HN for some reason.

------
mickrussom
lennart poettering is the santa claus politician of *nix , well just Linux
because none of his garbage ports.

He promises stuff that does magic and its free, but the reality is hey can
deliver, nor his sycophants and minions, anything that works.

He is poetter-izing linux, making it suck in the same ways as many commercial
OSen.

I have to say systemd is the crappiest rip off of SMF I have ever seen.

------
theflubba
Poettering is a complete asshole and deserves all the hate he gets. He
replaces perfectly fine software with his own shitty code, and has done noting
innovative in his entire life.

------
Thesaurus
Pottering needs to toughen up if he wants to dictate the majority of userland.
His attachment to Google+ is a bit annoying from a FOSS perspective too.

~~~
dalke
"Torvalds needs to tone down if he wants to dictate the majority of kernel
space" isn't much of an argument, is it? I don't see how your comment
regarding Pottering is any stronger.

Our attachment to Hacker News is also a bit annoying from a FOSS perspective,
unless there's been some release since the suggestion at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037)
. Torvalds uses Google+. How is your comment any different from the pot
calling the kettle black?

~~~
Thesaurus
Torvalds needs to tone down nothing. The Kernel would be utter shit if he
wasn't cracking the whip on people. I personally find his language on LKML
hysterical and enlightening; he writes well too. I appreciate when people are
honest and don't sugar coat things.

I wasn't aware Torvalds uses G+, shame on him for doing so. The comment was
more about the absurd policies the user signs off on to use the service more
than the lack of source code, not that that isn't an issue.

HN being closed source is a bummer. I respect a webmasters choice to refrain
from publishing server side code. But considering most of the content
discussed on HN, it is hypocritical. As unethical as HN is from a FOSS
standpoint, I can't turn away from a site where the user-base falls on the
right side of a bell curve for I.Q. Too good to pass up.

------
roghummal
>My involvement with the kernel community ended pretty much before it even
started, I never post on LKML, and haven't done in years.

Poor baby. Why is everyone so mean to him? He's western, white, straight,
male, 30s-40s (really?).

> I can only imagine that it is much worse for members of minorities, or
> people from different cultural backgrounds, in particular ones where losing
> face is a major issue.

Speaks for itself.

