
"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this" - basil
https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13rdjryqyn1xlt3522sxpugoz3gujbhh04
======
nanoscopic
I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep
in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people,
especially those you don't agree with.

I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to
developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by
Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would "shame" me for pointing
out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge. Additionally, the
founder of Perl Mongers, Brian D Foy, argued with me about the naming of my
application framework, and then refused to approve the naming of my module
even after other people on the newsgroup discussed it with me and we came to a
good resolution. ( which led to the vanishing of "registered" modules on cpan
imo )

The open source community, at large, is not a happy helpful place, and I have
gone through a lot of harassment just contributing my own free open source
stuff to the world. Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for
contributing. Just kicked in the face.

I am referencing names of individuals so that people can lookup these events
and see the truth in what I'm saying; NOT to shame these people. They are all
good developers, and I value their contributions ( don't necessarily like
these people but what does that matter ). There should be respect in the
community regardless of whether you like or dislike people's projects.

~~~
mike_hearn
The internet in general has problems with this, but I suspect it's much worse
in the open source world where unmoderated forums are standard. If you look at
the moderation tools available in something like mailman, they're very poor.
It's just not been a priority for technical discussion forums at all. And the
social convention is to leave forums largely unmoderated anyway, so it's easy
to get into a downward spiral where behaviour gets more and more extreme as
people try to make their opinions stand out amongst the crowd.

What's worse, the fact that this scares off contributors is hard to spot,
because you by definition cannot easily measure contributions that would have
happened but didn't because of a community problem.

If you look at non-technical forums like Facebook, newspaper comment sections
etc there's usually some form of moderation that imposes house rules like "be
civil". This sort of thing can clean up individual forums but the wider
problem remains: some people are just nasty and they often believe they can
influence the development of their favourite project by being sufficiently
nasty to developers they disagree with. If they can't do that in the project's
own forums they'll do it elsewhere.

The Bitcoin community has pretty severe problems with this too, it's not just
a Linux thing.

~~~
kazinator
You cannot moderate mailing lists because they are not centralized. When you
hit "reply all" in a mailing list, the replies go directly to everyone who is
on the To: or Cc: list. The list robot is just one of those parties. And of
course, private replies are possible that the list robot doesn't even see.

Some lists try to fix this by abusing Reply-to: to try to steer discussion
replies to the list address, but that is fundamentally broken.

About all you can do in a mailing list is to cull the junk from the permanent
web archive.

[Edit: look, you can downvote all you like. I know how mailing lists work and
stand by what I wrote. I have used mailing lists for almost a quarter century,
and I run mailing lists of my own. I know the ins and outs, and ways they can
be configured.]

~~~
DonHopkins
That's not what a mailing list is. What you are describing is an email message
with multiple recipients, not a mailing list. Mailing lists don't include the
email addresses of all of the recipients in the distributed messages To or CC
fields, and the From and Reply-to is the address of the mailing list, never a
list of all users on the mailing list.

Mailing lists are centrally managed, and have a "reflector" or central
distribution point (what you call a "robot") which maintains the email
addresses of all the people on the mailing list. In order to add or remove
yourself to the mailing list, you typically have to send a message to name-of-
mailing-list-REQUEST, not to the whole mailing list of course. Now days there
are usually web pages that people can use to subscribe and unsubscribe and
view the archives, and which the administrator can use to moderate messages,
but in the old days the moderator was a human and administered the list via
email. To save bandwidth (in the days that it mattered, i.e. over the slow
ARPANET and over international connections and expensive dial up modems) there
would be redistribution lists for regions and organizations, which users or
local administrators would have to manage themselves (or the central
administrator would have to forward requests to the redistribution list
administrator), so only one copy of the message had to be sent to each
redistribution list.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list)

An electronic mailing list or email list is a special use of email that allows
for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is
similar to a traditional mailing list — a list of names and addresses — as
might be kept by an organization for sending publications to its members or
customers, but typically refers to four things:

1) a list of email addresses,

2) the people ("subscribers") receiving mail at those addresses,

3) the publications (email messages) sent to those addresses, and

4) a reflector, which is a single email address that, when designated as the
recipient of a message, will send a copy of that message to all of the
subscribers.

~~~
kazinator
What you're describing is a particular mailing list configuration (one often
seen today); not what mailing lists _are_.

Traditional mailing lists (such as ones created by a vanilla install of GNU
Mailman) do not work they way you describe.

They work like this:

1\. You send a message to a mailing list address. This address belongs to a
software agent which sends the message to everyone. Your From: header is
clearly preserved. The mailing list robot adds itself to the Cc: line to stay
in the loop.

2\. Someone who wants to continue your discussion publicly hits Reply All. At
this point, the mail software composes a a new message which To: you, From:
this person, and Cc: to the mailing list.

3\. You receive the message directly. The robot also receives it because it is
in the Cc: loop, and sends it to the subscribers. (If you're also one of the
subscrbers, and the list is configured that way, it will avoid sending you a
"list copy").

4\. And so it goes.

But what do I know; I have only used mailing lists for 25 years, and run
mailing lists of my own on my own server.

~~~
anthony_d
What you describe certainly used to be common, but it's not anymore. You
didn't say why the old style is better.

I find it frustrating for a mailing list because invariably a long thread is
going to have missing messages. In the context of a mailing list the default
behavior should be to reply to the list and setting the Reply-To takes care of
that nicely.

Btw, the "because I've been doing it for n years" argument gets less effective
as n increases. Ok, it's probably a bell curve but it peaks long before 25.

~~~
kazinator
Reply-To does not take care of anything nicely. There is no "default" behavior
about how to reply; you have to think about whether to reply privately or
publicly based on the topic and your intended content. (If anything, the
default should probably be privately, unless the response really is of
interest to the whole multitude of subscribers. All too often, mailing list
discussions devolve to the point that it's not the case.)

Reply-To: stomps over the option of replying privately. It can still be done,
with manual steps. Worse, someone might not be paying attention, and just use
Reply out of habit, thinking it's a private reply, when in fact it is being
broadcast to the list. It's very sneaky!

The old style is better because it is more convenient and non-broken. It keeps
conversations intact by letting people have a debate with the mailing list
without subscribing to it, and doesn't rudely re-program your Reply button
into doing Reply All.

------
chris_wot
Yeah, this was discussed about an hour ago, and it hit the flame filter pretty
fast. I'd suggest that it won't last very long on the front page.

Incidentally, I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN. What has
happened to Lennart, and the behaviour of Linus Torvalds as a bully, is
probably something decent to talk about.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859)

~~~
xroche
You need to understand one thing: you are wrong.

Linus Torvalds is not a bully. He's in charge of one of the biggest and most
successful project out there. And this project is open-source, and anyone can
contribute to it. Anyone. Even your cat. Imagine the Windows codebase being
opened to anyone, with anyone being able to suggest fixes and send patches, or
ask questions, or make suggestions.

You do not want any idiot to commit insane things. You need to have some
barriers. And these barriers are related to technical skills.

You have to understand that the alternative to "Linus is mean" is "Linus let a
fucking patch enter the kernel, and it broke millions of machines around the
world, causing millions of dollars worth of damage". Every single line
committed in the kernel must be carefully checked, and if you lack the skills,
just go away, because it will (1) spoil the precious kernel maintainers time
and more importantly (2) do damages to millions of users.

So I am personally very glad Linus is "abrasive", because when someone screw
up, he makes it perfectly clear, and this is totally appropriate considering
how critical the linux kernel is nowadays.

And yes, if you want to live in a politically correct, nice, cheerful project,
this is not the project you need to work for.

[Having said that, I do not think Linus has ever been dishonest (such as
refusing a patch only because he did not like its author, unlike some
C-library guy), which is precisely the reason why his abrasiveness is
perfectly fine to me]

~~~
mike_hearn
You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high
stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to
operate with reasonable team dynamics? There is no correlation between "runs
an important project" and "must be an asshole" even though certainly everyone
has off days from time to time (I've been known to flame people when reaching
the end of my tether but usually regretted it later).

I think this notion - which Linus pushes - that the alternative to yelling at
people and generally being short tempered is always "political correctness"
... well it's quite harmful. Yes, it _CAN_ get that way, if people interpret
criticism of their work as personal criticism and try to shut it down by
complaining about it. I've seen that happen before. Some people don't know how
to handle someone implying, even if politely, that their work sucks and can't
handle it. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way and well functioning
teams manage to avoid it.

~~~
forgottenpass
_You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high
stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to
operate with reasonable team dynamics?_

I wonder about those projects sometime. If we took all of the conversations
that ever took place at their office and stuck them online and in public. What
would that be like? How many journalists and bloggers would find inflammatory
quotes that can be published out of context to shame the person who spoke
those words? How would Linus stack up next to John Doe of the Foo project?

Or, think about everything you read, said, wrote or heard at work over the
last month. Now imagine hand wringing blogposts about all of it. Especially
the things that you want to exclude from this thought experiment because they
would have never been said if your only communication method was a public
mailing list.

------
bhouston
I'll probably get burned for saying this but I think this is related to
GamerGate/SocialJusticeWarriors. I think that other controversy is being
portrayed as anti-feminist (and there is a lot of undertones of that) but I
think that it is more indicative of a general problem -- it is basically
unrestrained incivility against those whom one has disagreements, or who has
done perceived wrongs.

For some reason it has become really easy to escalate things quickly from what
are disagreements or perceived wrongs to really intense hatred and online
forms of retaliation that is so extreme that it overshadows the original
disagreements/wrongs.

It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments,
the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the
loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with.

This type of crazy retaliation is really harmful to those that are targeted,
but it also serves to detract from legitimate arguments. It is just weird.

But this is the internet and I suspect it isn't really that easy to curb going
full "4chan" on subjects because it can be "fun" for those involved because
there are few personal consequences -- as per that sociology concept of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation).

~~~
imanaccount247
>It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments,
the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the
loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with.

Except the anonymity involved means people on the other side send abuse to
themselves and their side in order to shift discussion off of the topic and
onto how their opponents are evil abusive monsters. And then of course people
who just love stirring up shit send abuse to both sides purely because they
enjoy it.

~~~
bhouston
I think the anonymity is the core problem-- anonymous crowds are easy to
undermine
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur))
and they are always the least self-controlled. But the larger, amorphous and
distributed the anonymous group, the more easy it is to undermine them via
real Agent provocateurs and also people who are in it just for the kicks of
causing havoc.

~~~
mkal_tsr
> I think the anonymity is the core problem

This explains the high level of rational discourse on news websites and
Facebook :-)

------
antirez
I must be very lucky... because after many many years of writing open source,
being involved with at least three communities (IT security with hping, Tcl
language with Tcl/Jim-Interpreter, Databases with Redis) I still have to
receive serious attacks. Actually the only attacks I can remember are about my
vision on how diversity should be handled (I was accused of sexism for saying
that people are all alike), and a few company-driven attacks 99% generated
from the SF area and for people working for competing companies, and with a
big overlap of people accusing me of sexism (go figure...). Basically none of
this was ever a great deal, and the remaining 99.999% of the OSS community was
always awesome. Basically I'm just a single data point but as somebody
involved for a long time in OSS, I can't confirm what I read.

Well, also consider this: I refuse most pull requests, and I'm not the kind of
guy that is kind at every cost. I also am part of a minority, being _very_
southern-european, from Sicily, often associated with the worst cliché of the
Italian culture, Mafia, ... I also have a vision on software development which
is very far from what is considered "good practice". One could expect me to
receive more attacks than average.

~~~
solipsism
Could you hint or point us toward some of the ways your vision on software
development is far from what is considered good practice? I like to absorb
counter-normal opinions.

~~~
antirez
Just a few examples: reinvent the wheel (Redis uses its own event loop,
strings library, and in general has very little external deps). Always
backporting new features when they have little interactions with the rest on
the code base, to patch-level releases of the stable version. Using data
structures or algorithms which are not common. For example Redis implements
LRU by random sampling. Taking extreme tradeoffs: Redis is also a store but
the dataset is in RAM, Redis Cluster does not try to achieve theoretical
optimum of CP or AP in order to win latency, lack of metadata, simplicity, and
so forth.

------
aidenn0
Lennart specifically called out Gentoo; as a Gentoo user, I do want to speak
up in defense of the Gentoo community.

I will concede the point that Lennart has, by far, probably received more
vitriol per-capita from the Gentoo community than any others. I'm not going to
defend any of the personal attacks launched on him.

However, Lennart writes very opinionated software, and the opinions it takes
are more at clash with the Gentoo way than the Fedora way or the Ubuntu way.
Furthermore it seems to me that Gentoo users are more conservative than any
distro other than Slack.

What this adds up to is that a far larger fraction of the Gentoo community
have issues with Lennart's software. There will be some fraction X of people
who have issues with his software that will make inappropriate attacks on
Lennart himself. Given that a much larger fraction of the Gentoo community has
issues with his software than in other communities, the fact he gets a
disproportionate amount of vitriol from Gentoo users doesn't necessarily mean
that X is larger in Gentoo.

~~~
crististm
Indeed. About ten years ago, there was a saying on Gentoo site saying that it
is a bug if you can't customize your gentoo system the way you want it.

Personal attacks are not OK, but he should keep his opinion on what _my_
machine should do for himself. For what it is worth, his systemd is a bug.

~~~
Someone1234
> but he should keep his opinion on what _my_ machine should do for himself

Releasing free software and what you accuse him of are entirely different
things. Frankly I'd like to understand how you even equate someone releasing
software which you aren't even forced to use, to essentially ramming his
opinions of how YOUR machine should run down your throat.

The anti-systemd people really aren't coming across at all well in this
thread. At lot of what you guys are accusing him of literally makes no sense
on the most basic level. This being a prime example.

Don't like systemd? Don't install systemd. Don't like that a distro is
bundling systemd? Don't use the distro that is bundling systemd.

The creator of systemd cannot be held responsible for you voluntarily
installing the software, leaving it on your system, and then becoming upset
about how it works. If you installed systemd and hate it, remove it. It aint'
rocket science.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Unfortunately, things aren't as simple as you'd like them to be.

The systemd developers have made many political decisions that ended up
putting systemd in a position that makes it difficult to avoid. The prime move
often cited is the engulfment of udev inside the systemd codebase and
entangling it with systemd's shared files (formerly belonging to libsystemd-
shared, not it's just a big libsystemd blob), and later rewriting the build
system so that it was harder (though not impossible) to make udev-only builds.
This and many other decisions prompted the creation of eudev. Of course, now
they're converting the transport layer from Netlink to sd-bus, thus intending
on making udev _systemd-only_ , and taunting Gentoo users along the way.

Furthermore, various distribution maintainers (though particularly Debian and
Arch) are placing various components that _optionally_ use systemd libraries,
or provide systemd units, as being _dependent_ on systemd. You can see this
with Arch and lighttpd.

Further, GNOME's adoption of systemd libraries was negotiated by Lennart as
far back as 2011. Though it would have likely occurred anyway, he was an
active instigator in the ordeal ([https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-
devel-list/2011-May/...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-
list/2011-May/msg00427.html)), and a couple of years later was arguing on his
G+ feed that with systemd-logind being unportable and inseparable, that this
should be a reason for Debian to adopt it. He chose to do this rather than
continue ConsoleKit or make logind an independent daemon. Currently, more is
being consolidated: Avahi is now becoming systemd-resolved, and kmscon is
becoming systemd-consoled. Among other examples.

But it's not just the GNOME Shell, some core Desktop Linux applications now
depend on systemd libraries, as well. upower and udisks2 come to mind. The
former even caused quite a stir in Gentoo circles when a regular upower update
was suddenly pulling in the entire systemd stack.

The whole point of systemd is to be _the_ standard userspace middleware for a
GNU/Linux system, and to be an absolute essential.

No, Lennart is not a rampaging monster, but to say that he's just some
innocent bloke who's simply releasing free software, is bullshit.

~~~
mike_hearn
But again, nobody is _forcing_ you to use systemd. You are upset because you
want to upgrade some part of your OS but not have systemd, even though the
developers of the part you want to upgrade decided to use it. But you could
just .... not upgrade. You could use Debian Stable, or fork the programs that
are using systemd to take it out.

It's been years since I used desktop Linux, but frankly so far my impression
of systemd is that it sounds like someone in the Linux community is finally
doing some damned architecture work for once instead of just trying to build a
desktop on top of a pile of historical accidents. I remember when GNOME 2 was
being developed (back then I _was_ a user) and the massive, rampaging
flamewars about how GNOME 2 was killing Linux, how it was fundamentally
against the UNIX way etc. Back then it was Havoc Pennington who got shitted on
by the "community" for daring to suggest that maybe you don't really need
seven kinds of clock widget installed by default. And now what I see is people
forking GNOME because they love GNOME 2 so much and they don't want to switch
to GNOME 3.

Back when I used to work on Linux related stuff, one of my projects was a
cross-distro packaging framework. The idea was you could create binaries
that'd install and be upgradeable on any reasonable distribution. We did a lot
of work into binary compatibility and other tools so you could make binaries
that soft-linked against libraries, etc. The amount of crap we got was unreal.
A lot of people in high places in the community, especially from
distributions, _hated_ the idea that maybe people could just download apps
from a website and it'd work. I think at some level they understood that
distros competed largely on the size of their package repositories and if that
approach to software distribution became mainstream they'd lose their "lock
in". And some of them had internalised the idea that "Linux is great. Linux
doesn't distribute software in the same way as other platforms. Therefore
that's what makes Linux great."

When I look at MacOS X what I see is a very successful OS that has an
architecture rather similar to what systemd sounds like (the OS X equivalent
is called Launch Services). So maybe that's why distros are getting behind it.

~~~
nwmcsween
You are forced when you cannot use the software you used before.

~~~
acdha
Forced – does that mean they raided your servers and deleted the old source
code or just that you want someone else to do new development following your
whims but aren't willing to do it yourself?

------
yummyfajitas
So I'm a blogger with posts that occasionally go semi-viral [1], and I've been
subject to unpleasant comments on a few occasions. Here are a couple of posts
which have gotten me quite a bit of hate:

[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html)

[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html)

In both cases they are posts about mathematics which use other topics
(economics, dating) as concrete examples and the examples draw hatred.

However, unlike many of the people subject to unpleasant behavior such as
this, I'm going to suggest that the best thing to do is ignore it and move on
with your life. I don't favor much in the way of systematic solutions.
Assorted "codes of conduct" being proposed are blunt instruments and are
easily used by people in power to bully others or to shut down discussion of
"incorrect" opinions.

Furthermore, technology is fairly unique in it's communication. In many
fields, communication is there to create a sense of community and in-group
status - creating a tribe. In our field, most communication is simply about
facts. It's quite easy to ignore "you're wrong because X,Y,Z _and a big jerk_
" \- just evaluate argument X,Y,Z and update your beliefs accordingly.

Back when I lived in NY, a coach told me (rough paraphrase): "Tu debil.
Necesita para construir tu corpu." ("You're weak. You need to build your
body.") In the recent past, the tech world's culture was a lot like that of a
mexican boxing club. The correct response is "si, mi SQL debil, eu pratico."
("Yes, my SQL is weak, I'll practice.")

Somewhere along the line, we gave this up and became a culture where feelings
matter more than results. I think the solution here is for the tech world to
regrow the thick skin it once had.

[1] A post about functional programming is limited in it's eventual virality.

~~~
minikites
This is different for men and women.

[http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-
ar...](http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-
welcome-internet-72170/)

"Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit
or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7."

[http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-
online/](http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/)

The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they
are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining
because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women,
back in their “place.”

~~~
belorn
When the message is a threat of violence or hitmen, it should be taken serious
regardless of the targeted person gender.

It is very important to not trivialize harassment directed at men because they
are male and not female. That is part of the very gender stereotype that it is
the cause of the statistics your referenced, and reinforcing that behavior
will only make things worse.

~~~
angersock
No, that's stupid, because the cost of taking it seriously is far far greater
than the estimated badness of any of those threats.

Reasoning like that is why we have the TSA.

~~~
teddyh
You misunderstood; belorn meant “ _it should be taken_ [equally] _serious
regardless of the targeted person_ [’s] _gender_ ”.

------
rbanffy
> in particular ones where losing face is a major issue

This touches an interesting point. Feedback must be accurate. If you are
actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that
you are "not right". Losing face is a fact of life. When I'm wrong, I want to
know I am wrong, what I am wrong about and just how wrong am I. If possible,
tell me what can I do to be right the next time.

It must also be kind. You do not point someone is wrong to humiliate the
person and you should take care not to (I try and I fail more often than I'd
like to) fall into the trap of judging a person for his or her first efforts.

Having said that, I am almost sure all the exaggerated discourse on the Linux
kernel mailing list is not really part of the message, but should be
understood as more like a sport, a game, where the one with the most
elaborately crafted insult wins. When Linus says you should be retroactively
aborted he most likely wants to say you are very wrong and your idea is really
bad and that, maybe, you should be more thorough the next time you submit a
patch. Their time is a finite resource.

Is this the most efficient way to run the community? Probably not. We just
don't know what is the most efficient way to do it and it can just be that
Linus found a local maximum.

~~~
freehunter
>If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you
you that you are "not right".

Saying "you're wrong" isn't the issue here. Saying "your mom should have
aborted you and i hope you die" is the issue. I don't think people in cultures
where losing face is a big issue much care if they're told they're wrong. They
care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or be
killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts of the
world.

What you say in defense of the mailing list insults is the same thing that has
been said about casual racism or casual misogyny in other groups normally
dominated by white men. It scares away other groups and cultures, and it's not
acceptable anywhere.

~~~
rbanffy
Maybe, just maybe, "your mom should have aborted you and i hope you die" is
just an overly elaborated form of saying you are wrong and should not be taken
literally.

> They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or
> be killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts
> of the world.

Nobody is wrong enough to warrant that. I see the "elaborate insult" thing can
get out of hand, but, still, it should not be taken at face value. I believe
the proper way to deal with this is to either engage in an escalation of
extremely elaborate insults (provided you accompany that with technical
argument defending your "bad" idea) signalling the insult is not the topic
being discussed (but it's "adorning" the arguments) or stating, privately,
that the insult crosses a line and asking the person to please not to that
again. It _usually_ works.

Disclaimer: I am a caucasian straight married male in his mid-40's. I probably
belong to the demographic least susceptible to bullying and some of the
situations described here are probably very alien to me. I appreciate
constructive feedback, however. I do not know how the moderators would react
to an insult war, however, so I advise against it, even if you think it proves
your point.

~~~
rbanffy
Hint: downvoting is not a good way to provide constructive criticism.

~~~
Karunamon
Another symptom of feelings-over-results: quick and effort-free attacks like
downvoting take the place of elaboration and reasoned debate.

------
Mikeb85
Open source is not awful. It's perhaps the most important thing to happen to
computing, ever. Multi-billion dollar companies have formed largely around
open source. It enables millions of people to do business. Learning how to
code is easier than ever.

Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying
free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time,
or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying
free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day...

Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good. Well, a little more
than that, but that's the basic gist.

I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS. The few times I've
found a bug I sent a bug report, the maintainer was super friendly (maybe
because I wasn't a whiny douche-bag complaining about something that I got for
free), and fixed it in an absurdly short amount of time (less than a day).
Even if it wasn't fixed for a month I'd have been more than happy.

Anyhow, the open source community is much like the world at large. Many very
nice, friendly people, and a few assholes. Same thing if you step outside.
It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your
interactions, but rather as a sharing philosophy in the same way free markets
are an economic philosophy.

~~~
inclemnet
> Open source is not awful.

He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways.
You're doing nothing more than fighting a strawman.

> Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good

This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about
the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties),
and I can't honestly believe you don't know that.

> I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS.

Another classic false argument that comes up all the time - do you think your
good experiences cancel out his bad ones, or the other bad ones discussed
elsewhere in this thread?

> It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your
> interactions

More weird phrasing that seems a bit of a strawman. Who said that the open
source community 'replaces' one's interactions? Can a community not have bad
characteristics simply because it's not the only community you're involved in?
This really makes no sense.

> but rather as a sharing philosophy

Again, this is an argument from nothing more than being pedantic. It's
incredibly obvious that the original post isn't referring at all to the
general philosophies of open source, but to the actual communities he
participates in, in terms that are not remotely unusual. Even if you're
adamant that open source as a term must only refer to the philosophy and none
of the practical details, you've done nothing to affect the original argument,
because it's still about the communities that exist around it in practice.

Overall, I think your post is a bit of a mess of bad arguments and classic
fallacies.

~~~
Mikeb85
> He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways.

But none of those ways have anything to do with open source. You need to look
no further than #gamergate to see that people act like assholes on the
internet.

> This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about
> the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties),
> and I can't honestly believe you don't know that.

I know that, but equating a concept with people is like equating the corner
block outside with the drug dealer that sells there. "Street corners are
awful!"

> t's incredibly obvious that the original post isn't referring at all to the
> general philosophies of open source, but to the actual communities he
> participates in, in terms that are not remotely unusual.

So instead of saying those communities suck, he says open source can be awful
in some ways...

Communities can suck in any industry/hobby/interest/etc...

~~~
inclemnet
> But none of those ways have anything to do with open source

More bad arguments! He didn't say that open source is unique. Perhaps he's
simply talking about the communities he's actually involved in.

> equating a concept with people

I don't think you do get it. Nothing about Lennart's terminology is
particularly unusual - the 'open source community' in standard parlance is a
fairly well defined set of people, organisations and forums that isn't
particularly controversial to refer to.

I think you really are just using different words as everyone else to mean the
same things.

~~~
Mikeb85
> Perhaps he's simply talking about the communities he's actually involved in.

Then he should have said 'The communities I'm involved in are awful'. And I'd
agree. I didn't realize he made PulseAudio and Systemd (or was involved in
some way). I personally don't mind either project (neither have harmed my
Linux experience, Pulse is convenient for my uses), and I think both get a lot
of unwarranted criticism. Not least for the fact that, with open source, you
don't _HAVE_ to be stuck with anything you don't want to be.

> I don't think you do get it. Nothing about Lennart's terminology is
> particularly unusual - the 'open source community' in standard parlance is a
> fairly well defined set of people, organisations and forums that isn't
> particularly controversial to refer to. I think you really are just using
> different words as everyone else to mean the same things.

See, this is the thing. I'm not part of that community. I could care less. But
the reason why conversations like this aren't useful, is that you're equating
a specific group of people with a concept, but criticizing the concept.

Posts like this find their way outside the community. They give fodder to
those who would like to see all software be closed source. They aren't
helpful.

Again, he should be far more explicit in what he's actually criticizing...

~~~
inclemnet
> Then he should have said 'The communities I'm involved in are awful

Luckily he doesn't need to, because (as above) he's obviously talking about
the open source community.

> I could care less

You _couldn 't_ care less.

I really think none of your criticisms are a real problem, or that there's any
real ambiguity. I won't keep replying, it doesn't seem useful.

~~~
Mikeb85
> Luckily he doesn't need to, because (as above) he's obviously talking about
> the open source community.

Which open-source community? The Linux kernel community is very different from
say, the Haskell community (which is also very invested in open-source).

> You couldn't care less.

You accuse me of splitting hairs on semantics, yet you choose to correct me
here. You understood what I meant, local slang here (for better or for worse)
is to say what I wrote (even if it's not 100% gramatically correct), but you
are more than willing to criticise me for not 'accepting' ambiguous language
for something that should be 'obvious' to 'the open-source community'...

------
fidotron
He's just the new Drepper.

Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just
pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole.

Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have
made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is
potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may
even demonstrate git is the more important contribution, because as it stands
Linux as a potential platform for end user deployment, except as part of
Android or Chrome OS, is basically dead now.

~~~
RVuRnvbM2e
I'd be very interested if you could provide evidence of Lennart being an
asshole. I've honestly never seen him be anything other than professional.

~~~
fidotron
His entire m.o. is passive aggressive asshole, whereas Linus is balls out
asshole, but has the relatively unique quality of being right more often than
not.

I'd even argue this post is lennart using the genuinely disgusting antics of
others as a way to deflect potential criticism of his work in future. This is
why, like Drepper, many view him as a long term liability to the ecosystem as
a whole.

~~~
the_why_of_y
That's odd... I thought passive-aggressive is when you're deliberately failing
to do something you're supposed to do and capable of doing, but what he's
usually accused of is actually doing too many things - please clarify this
apparent contradiction.

------
forca
I agree somewhat with Lennart. The Libre/OSS community is full of egotistical
asshats -- generally western and in their 30s and 40s. What's funny, though,
is that not all camps in the community are that bad. The Linux camp has
deteriorated in recent years -- I've noticed it myself on several occasions.
The BSD camps don't suffer near as much from the nonsense that occurs on the
Linux side. I think there are several reasons for this. One I have notice in
person working on both sides is that the BSD crews tend to be more
professional overall. They love UNIX and the goal has always been to create
the best UNIX-like OS around. The BSD license is arguably better IMO as well.
Quite a few Linux devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and
tend to be vocal closed-source opponents for the sake of being vocal. The
world cannot be all closed source or all open source. There is room for
everyone. Most of the issues with people I have had over the three decades
I've been in IT have been with Linux-based devs and users. Without exception
all BSD guys and girls have been the pinnacle of professionalism. I think this
speaks volumes and is quite telling. This is not observation from one
workplace -- this is over many, many years in different work spaces, different
cultures, states, whatnot.

All things considered, I have been seriously thinking of moving my core
infrastructure over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD to avoid the coming (well, here
already) continued balkanisation of Linux. The code quality of Linux has
deteriorated of late as well. I've noticed it. My BSD test boxes running the
same software suffer nary a hitch. Debian seems to be sane still, as does
Slackware, but for how long. This ridiculous systemd battle is bonkers.

~~~
_delirium
Interesting viewpoint; I don't have the same perception, but communities are
big, so you might be right. Do you mean purely the sysadmin community in
workplaces, or also the developer community? For developer communities, the
BSD world seems to have a pretty wide range of community friendliness, but I
wouldn't describe it as uniformly pleasant and professional. Certainly the
OpenBSD community is not that: there are many good things about de Raadt, but
the tone he sets is more one of combative-and-right than pleasant-and-
professional (and he's not the only one in the community with that tone). He's
no less prone to flamage than Torvalds, anyway. The only _really_ friendly BSD
developer community I've encountered is the NetBSD one, which seems to make an
active effort at cultivating a certain ethos. FreeBSD is maybe somewhere in
between, though I think trending friendlier compared to some years ago. Some
sub-communities are also quite pleasant, like the ZFS one (which lives a bit
more in Illumos-land, but has a lot of BSD contributors as well).

~~~
forca
I'm talking devs and sysadmins. I agree with you that NetBSD is the
friendliest of the bunch.

Theo de Raadt is a great guy. He gets a bad rap when it's undeserved. What the
OBSD guys is very serious stuff. He gets a lot of flak but running an OS and
security software project as successfully as he does takes a strong
personality. He has that, and in the real, he's a nice, friendly guy. He
simply has no tolerance for people with no merit and nothing to add. Anyone
would be the same.

I've met a couple of snarky FreeBSD admins, but they were also Linux and
Windows admins at the same time. These two guys were full of themselves
regardless of platform.

BSD (in general) tends to be more polished than Linux and suffers fewer bugs
out of the box. Again, this is what I've noticed. I've yet, in almost 20 years
of using FreeBSD off and on, ever had an issue with it that was a deal
breaker. I cannot say this of the various Linux distros.

~~~
oDot
I've never used BSD before, but from reading FreeBSD's BSD vs Linux [0], I
can't see a major difference aside of the license, and the number of
distributions available. Can you please explain what made you go on off using
BSD/Linux?

[0]: [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-
bsd/compa...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-
bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html)

~~~
forca
I have noticed over the last ten or so years that FreeBSD in particular is
ridiculously stable -- far more so than any Linux distro I have tried,
including Red Hat, CentOS, and Debian.

I have stable Linux machines running Debian and I have FreeBSD test machines
running the same software. FreeBSD uses less resources (exact same HW), tends
to be slightly faster, and is arguably easier to admin on a daily basis. Let's
not even mention ZFS, which is remarkable in its own right. I'm impressed. I
once ran an OpenBSD pf firewall that supported almost 200 users on some
seruously underpowered HW. This thing's load average was always ridiculously
low. Ditto FreeBSD now. What will cause the Debain machines to peak out
sometimes, FreeBSD doesn't seem to notice. Interesting and a bit impressive.

~~~
_delirium
I also like both FreeBSD and Debian (have no real experience with the others).
But on _performance_ it varies a lot by workload. To take two examples: over
the years at any given point in time, FreeBSD has had a better networking
stack than Linux, but worse scalability to large numbers of cores. Though
there is some ongoing sponsored work on the latter [1,2].

[1] [http://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/freebsd-foundation-and-
ix...](http://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/freebsd-foundation-and-ixsystems-
collaborate-to-further-the-cause-of-high-performance-computing-on-freebsd/)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8123512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8123512)

------
nathanb
He calls Linus out for being a toxic element in the open source (or at least
Linux) ecosystem. This is quite probably true.

Trying to look at it from the other side, though, I wonder if Linus got to be
the way he is because it's how he copes with the toxic effluvia he has to deal
with on a regular basis. Surely Torvalds has to deal with even more of this
than Poettering does. If these things were directed at me on a regular basis,
I can't claim with confidence that my moral fortitude would be up to the task
of remaining easy to work with either.

~~~
tanglesome
You know for being a toxic element, Linus's has done a hell of a job with
Linux. Is there anything else that's even come close to it in terms of
technical or business success? I don't think so.

~~~
nathanb
Yes, while I think he is culturally and emotionally toxic, he is also
brilliant, and has led Linux to great success. I respect his achievements and
his technical abilities. Do you think this excuses his behavior?

------
doe88
For all its flaws I must credit the various open source codes I've come to
study along the years for all I know in CS. Long term, it's more important
than degrees and schools.

For instance I vividly remember how hard for me it was to learn and code in
Objective-C for iOS back in 2009, at this time there was only few related open
source projects available to study and learn how good UI were implemented and
such, it was mostly a closed source world.

Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open
source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust
and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled
Rust developpers so far. I can't fathom how painful it must be for current
Swift developers to develop in a young (so far) closed project where you can't
see nothing and bang your head against every walls to find your way.

~~~
Dewie
> Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is
> open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in
> Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most
> skilled Rust developpers so far.

Last I saw, reading the compiler wasn't recommended (by someone) since the
code is apparently old and not idiomatic.

~~~
steveklabnik
Historically, that's been kind of true, but it depends on the part, really,
and is getting better all the time.

------
bad_user
This doesn't pertain to " _Open Source_ " in general, the same argument can be
said about companies and closed-source products, which can be just as well run
by jerks. I have a couple of small projects published on GitHub and the people
that interacted with me have been very professional and thankful for my work.
I am also a part of big open-source communities which are very professional
and asshole behavior is definitely an exception and is being punished in
general.

A comment like " _How did they not die as babies, considering that they were
likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?_ " is only tolerated if you're
Linus Torvalds or somebody like him that has contributed a lot and that is
tolerated in spite of his character. And yes, the world is full of jerks that
want to copy Linus Torvalds, or Theo de Raadt, or Richard Stallman, or Steve
Jobs, or David Heinemeier Hansson, or whatever else ruthless leader with
strong opinions that happened in this industry, but without the track record
to back up their strong thoughts. Open Source is only special because the
discussions are often public for anybody to see.

I do find Linus' behavior regrettable, as he's a very public person in this
industry, his opinions do have legs and he is a role model for others. And I'm
personally against PC talk, for example I think usage of the word "fuck" is
totally legitimate because it implies passion, it implies that you care, but I
think critiques should never be ad-hominem and people breaking this rule
should get social punishment, including Linus.

~~~
PaulHoule
I think if you're involved in a closed-source company and you act like an ass
too many times you'll get fired.

~~~
Niksko
The difference is that in a corporate setting, if you're fired that's the end
of it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, in an open source setting, if you act like an
asshat you can still contribute and discuss and continue to be an asshat. And
then other people ignore you. So you convince people that they're the asshat.
And people believe you because you're still there.

I'm not sure it's really a flaw. It's just the way it is. I feel as if it's
simply one of the tradeoffs that you make with an open source project. People
can hang around and be annoying and abusive and there isn't all that much you
can do to totally get rid of them if they're determined. On the other hand,
you can get brilliant programmers who come out of nowhere and have no
qualifications that would never get past the interview stage in a large
company.

------
oliwarner
It's easy to see that in some quarters this is certainly true. People are
allowed —even encouraged— to smack people down if they're being ridiculous...
But this isn't the rule.

[http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-
ubuntu/conduct](http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct)

As an Ubuntu member, I'm expected to behave. In our derivative communities, we
try to ensure that people adhere to these principles too. Ask Ubuntu (part of
Stack Exchange, not Canonical), for example, also requires people to adhere to
the Ubuntu CoC. Ubuntu Forums and IRC have similar behaviour guidelines.

Does that mean it's always civil? Of course not... But it does mean that
nobody's surprised when people are tossed out for being needlessly rude and
the non-technical flame wars of the late 90s just don't happen.

~~~
jnbiche
I'm not an Ubuntu contributor, but I have to give credit to the Ubuntu
community in that they _do_ try to create a welcoming place for contributors.
Of course, no one's perfect and I'm sure someone will dig up a counterexample,
but this has been my experience over the course of many years of interactions
with the community.

------
nateabele
Re: "the Open Source community is full of assholes"

s/Open Source community/human race/

Also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law)

~~~
AznHisoka
true. there's nothing different from open source ppl that makes them more
kind, or compassionate than the average human being.

------
rdtsc
> By many he [Linus] is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one.

I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the
team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no
Linux.

It is not a positive characteristic. I wish he wasn't as abrasive but that is
his personality.

What I feel Poettering is doing here is a bit of a "well on technical merits
Linus was right but I'll attack his abrasiveness instead". I suspect this is
related to the 'debug' flag and Linus chewing out one of the systemd
developers. I think Linus was justified in chewing him out. Maybe shouldn't
have used expletives, but still justified. And I understand it was a pattern
of behavior of leaving bugs in their wake and so on.

> If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of
> this behaviour.

Hard to say. Maybe so. Maybe if he wouldn't be as critical and as abrasive we
would have had a different OS or different community. Maybe better. Maybe
worse. hard to say.

~~~
ivraatiems
> I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the
> team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no
> Linux.

This attitude is precisely the problem. Being a smart or successful human
being does not alleviate your obligation to be a decent human being - neither
does having strong opinions and good reasons for them.

The argument you have made comes in another form, and I hope when I phrase it
this way you'll see why I disagree strongly: "Do you know who I am?!"

~~~
adnzzzzZ
I think there's another facet to the argument he made that he didn't make.
When you're in a position of power and you have to deal with the work of other
people you want to waste as little time as possible on people making stupid
mistakes that shouldn't be made in the first place. You want to bring the
quality of your contributors up.

One way of doing this is making people fear making mistakes. Society does this
all the time: if you are a racist/homophobe/sexist people will ostracize you
publicly in a number of ways. Essentially you get rid of
racists/homophobes/sexists by making them fear voicing those opinions.

I personally don't think this is a particularly good way of dealing with
problems, but it's what society does and it's how it works: based on mostly
punishment. To then go on to say that what Linus does is somehow bad or any
different seems kinda weird.

~~~
ivraatiems
Fear, as you seem to realize, is a crappy motivator. It only work in limited
circumstances and for limited periods of time. It doesn't really change
behavior permanently. That "society" does it doesn't make it any better (and
when was the last time a judge cussed out a defendant for receiving a guilty
verdict?)

But I would argue that motivating through fear isn't even relevant to this
situation. Is making death threats in order to convince somebody to stop doing
something a valid way to motivate through fear? Is cursing somebody out on a
mailing list really all that terrifying? If it is, is that the reason Linus,
for instance, does it?

I think the answer to all of these is no.

Further, it may be appropriate to shame racists, homophobes or sexists into
changing their ways (or, I would argue, just not espousing their views
publicly). But is it really appropriate to do this, to this extent especially,
to programmers who wrote bad code?

Programming relies on rational, careful cognitive consideration of problems.
That's the opposite of what fear inspires. Fear-based "motivation" is lousy in
general, and doubly lousy for open source software.

~~~
adnzzzzZ
>Is making death threats in order to convince somebody to stop doing something
a valid way to motivate through fear?

I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the people
who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats are
not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and not
an example of how the community behaves.

>Is cursing somebody out on a mailing list really all that terrifying?

I think it is since public shaming tends to be effective in preventing
whatever behavior was shamed, as per the racist/homophobe/sexist argument.

>If it is, is that the reason Linus, for instance, does it?

I can't speak for him but if I were in charge of an important and sizable
project I can see myself doing it for that reason.

>But is it really appropriate to do this, to this extent especially, to
programmers who wrote bad code? Programming relies on rational, careful
cognitive consideration of problems. That's the opposite of what fear
inspires. Fear-based "motivation" is lousy in general, and doubly lousy for
open source software.

I don't follow why it's doubly lousy for software in general. Software has its
fair share of opinionated debates that are more about differences of
philosophy rather than careful cognitive consideration of problems. And as for
it being the opposite of what fear inspires, I'm not sure I agree. The
educational system world wide uses fear effectively and it seems to mostly
work (despite whatever problems you may have with it), so I don't see what
would make programming special in that regard.

~~~
ivraatiems
>I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the
people who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats
are not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and
not an example of how the community behaves.

In this statement I was referring to the issue being discussed in this
particular thread, not to Linus. Sorry, should have been clearer.

> I think it is since public shaming tends to be effective in preventing
> whatever behavior was shamed, as per the racist/homophobe/sexist argument.

But as I said - it doesn't change behavior, it only changes whether or not one
publicly displays one's thoughts. And even then, it's a temporary effect at
best.

> I don't follow why it's doubly lousy for software in general. Software has
> its fair share of opinionated debates that are more about differences of
> philosophy rather than careful cognitive consideration of problems. And as
> for it being the opposite of what fear inspires, I'm not sure I agree. The
> educational system world wide uses fear effectively and it seems to mostly
> work (despite whatever problems you may have with it), so I don't see what
> would make programming special in that regard.

It's lousy because it doesn't inspire real change. People don't change their
opinions because they got chewed out, even if it was rightfully so. They just
learn to resent the people doing the chewing out and oppose them more subtly.

You use our education system as an example - but I don't know that I'd say the
education parts of the system (as opposed to the discipline parts, whose
effectiveness I would frankly dispute) aren't fear-based. They're generally
built to be merit-based (whether they succeed is outside the scope of this
discussion).

------
jwr
As a data point and a side note: I've been participating in open source
discussions for more than 15 years now. This issue seems to come up more and
more, and it seems that many communities are deteriorating. Lennart is right
about Linus setting a bad example.

But not all is gloomy. As a positive example, the Clojure community has always
impressed me with its maturity. People are incredibly nice and helpful,
discussions are constructive. Bad tone is immediately struck down. And it is
true that a lot depends on the leader — Rich Hickey sets the example here and
people follow.

~~~
teleclimber
Exactly. Project leaders have the power to set the tone of discussions within
their communities. If abusive people are moderated, they don't propagate, and
the community gets more welcoming.

However this does not address the inter-project nastiness that the OP refers
to.

------
jaegerpicker
I certainly agree that there some Open source projects that are extremely
toxic, like the Linux Kernal, but I wish people wouldn't say all open source
is that way. The author has been through a lot of crazy shit for very silly
reasons, note I'm not blaming him in any way - no one should go through that
over volunteering free work. But I've contributed to Django, Flask, Python,
Meotor, and Node.js in different ways and though it's varied in how pleasant
the experience has been for the most part these communities were really
awesome, when dealing with the core teams. I think those are good examples of
better open source communities and I think they will tend to pick up more
developers that aren't willing to put up with all of the crap involved in the
Linux project.

------
pekk
I don't think it is fair to generalize this to all of Open Source. The Linux
kernel and the Systemd controversy in particular do not represent all of Open
Source. That said, I do think Lennart has very valid and important points
about the Linux kernel and the Linux community and specifically the Systemd
controversy. It's too bad.

But switching to Mac OS doesn't fix this, if we wanted to talk about that then
there is a whole set of separate issues there.

------
filmgirlcw
I'm glad Lennart wrote this, though obviously I'm sorry he had to do it.

I'd like to think this would open up a bigger dialog about the truly decrepit
level of discourse that is common on all too many OSS projects (not all, of
course, but many of them, and oftentimes, the older, the more nasty), but I'm
not that idealistic.

I don't think anyone, least of all Lennart, would say that his projects
(particularly PulseAudio and systemd) aren't up for criticism or discussion,
but what has happened to him has gone beyond criticism and into just nasty
territory.

But here's my question:

With so much of OSS being funded by large corporations (often through these
corps sponsoring employees to work on stuff full time), when do we finally
drop the "it's all volunteers so this shit is acceptable" mantra.

It's not all volunteers. It's people volunteering their time and collectively
sharing the source/combining efforts, but make no mistake, OSS is a huge
enterprise and is primarily funded by the Fortune 500. I cannot imagine that
the discourse that happens in some of these mailing lists and forums would be
allowed to exist without consequence if they were happening on an official
company listserv. I cannot imagine that Red Hat or IBM or whoever would let
this go on on their official channels without HR getting involved.

So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels?

Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo. Time for
the whole movement to grow up and be accountable to treating people like human
beings.

~~~
jtbigwoo
>> So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels?

>> Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo.

I wonder if this isn't part of the problem. Many of the massive open-source
blow-ups have been between people who are being paid to do it. It's not like a
guy from Red Hat, for example, can just pick a different project to contribute
to. His jobs depends on working in these abusive environments. The only way to
stop contributing would be to get a different job.

------
ZeroGravitas
This reminded me of the "This is Phil Fish: A case study in internet
celebrity" video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-
owa2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w)

Phil Fish is an indie game developer, internet-famous for the game Fez. And
"everybody" hates him. Though as the video explains, it's more complicated
than that.

The video is notably also as being referenced by Notch (creator of Minecraft)
as part of the reason why he decided to go into semi-retirement after the sale
of Mojang.

~~~
imanaccount247
That video is Phil's friend defending him by ignoring reality and saying "you
are wrong because I say so". Phil started getting hate because he exploited
people, ripped them off, abused them and acted like he was some sort of genius
for making a game he didn't even make, which won an award that was won because
his investor owns the contest and judged the entries.

The hate grew to massive portions mainly because of his response to that
initial hate. You can't insult everyone and expect them to thank you for it.

~~~
pantalaimon
Can you provide any examples for that?

~~~
imanaccount247
[http://www.lazygamer.net/pc-gaming/is-phil-fish-about-to-
be-...](http://www.lazygamer.net/pc-gaming/is-phil-fish-about-to-be-arrested-
for-racketeering/)

------
jblz
I'm not sure how this pertains to Open Source communities across the board..?
Seems to be a pretty targeted indictment of the Linux dev community. There are
plenty that don't stand for the type of bad acting described here.

~~~
acdha
The problem is that the Linux kernel is one of the longer running and most
influential open source communities so too many people have picked up the idea
that because Linus can say something mean, it's okay for them to do it, too —
as long as they're technically correct, of course, but which flame-warrior
doesn't believe that they're correcting an error?

------
martiuk
I sometime think whether some people, especially people like Lennart did not
experience bullying at school and would prefer the internet be policed to
prevent any "attacks" made towards them.

Sometimes you just need to take it on the chin and carry on.

Maybe it's because I'm from the UK and you just expect the the world to shit
on you whenever possible, I'm not really affected by outright attacks and
offensiveness, but I probably wouldn't let anyone get to me, like Lennart
shows.

------
spindritf
The whole post is just a weak assertion. Linus does run a really large project
with many, sometimes random, contributors quite efficiently and it's not
possible to tell whether it's because, despite, or regardless of his style
with a sample of one.

I'm also reasonably sure that Lennart Poettering's experience does not
generalize. He is rather unique within the Linux community.

------
musesum
A psychologist friend mentioned that invoking 2nd person (you) often escalates
conflict. I wonder what it would take to write a thread parser that bounces
comments with "you" as the focal point?

Sentiment analysis probably has some utility if bad commits are clustered
around a particular contributor. Would it be more product to represent
sentiment as a graph? What would it look like?

------
Touche
Some people are attributing this phenomenon to the internet, but I don't think
that's accurate. I studied Russian history in college and the writings of
various members of the communist intelligentsia had the same vitriol.
Particularly the writings between Lenin and Karl Kautsky. My professors called
it "maximalism", a term that hasn't caught on in general use. It's meaning is
the belief that anyone that disagrees with you even in small ways, disagrees
with you fully. I think this attitude is what occurs in OS communities, where
people who generally agree find themselves in angry exchanges.

------
liveoneggs
Maybe these strong reactions from core linux engineers have meaning. Maybe
strong reactions from large parts of the user base have meaning.

Maybe one reaps what one sows.

~~~
pekk
People also reap things that somebody else sowed, or that nobody sowed. There
is no physical law that anyone will be treated fairly.

------
andmarios
This post would be interesting if there wasn't the “all others do it except
us” accusation. Systemd zealots are exactly the same with any other open
source community's zealots and systemd's diva devs are exactly the same with
any other open source diva devs.

------
snarfy
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele)

Linus's approach is a cultural thing.

~~~
freehunter
A lot of discriminatory or hateful actions can be written off as cultural.
Racism is cultural in the Southern US. Doesn't mean it's acceptable.

~~~
snarfy
Absolutely. I'm not saying it's acceptable, only giving background. "I'm being
blunt." "I'm just being honest". etc. These are not excuses for being an
asshole. The same information can be shared without being an asshole about it.
Being an asshole towards others publicly on the mailing list is just another
form of bullying. If he wanted to be blunt or whatever, he could do it in
private messages. There is no need to publicly shame people.

------
theflubba
POETTERING EFFECT - It appears that lately some Linux developers are
concentrating on changing things (that work fine) with no particular reason,
breaking existing functionality in the process and running away before the job
is really finished (sometimes called the Poettering effect), while in fact it
would be better to make a nicely polished finished system that can be used
from installation without having to tune it up.

------
DogeDogeDoge
never cared who is behind a nick on the other side of the cable, if he is
white,black,yellow,green or pink. But i like the banter and sometimes people
are cursing at others not because of gender, race or any other factor but
because of emotions. If PC will get over everything soon it will be not
acceptable to say anything. Is this the internet we all fought for ? In
internet it doesn't matter who you are.

~~~
DogeDogeDoge
in interwebs you can be even atari owner...Yes even them are welcome and it
doesn't matter guy is atari owner. So why mix in chat about kernel patch code
that he is an atari owner ? he can't change it, and it doesn't matter. But
should he get less flame because he owns atari ? no.

------
naner
For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately
socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in
nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally
being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other.

In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated
to some degree. Online, in a domain where technical merit is king, however,
things tend to remain more dysfunctional than in real life. Some open source
groups make an effort to curate their communities and shun this behavior (for
example the SVN devs wrote about intentionally doing this on mailing lists
IIRC). I imagine some groups are not quite so organized, however, especially
very large groups.

I think Lennart's experience favors this anecdotal theory: The more technical
communities (Gentoo is given an example - and you have to be more comfortable
getting your hands dirty to run Gentoo than to run a distro like Ubuntu or
Fedora) empirically appear to be more dysfunctional.

I actually avoid going to technical conferences anymore since this dysfunction
and awkwardness is always intense and tiring/difficult to deal with. I'm not
exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a
large number of social situations by friends/family growing up since I have
always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself.

This doesn't only affect us, by the way. When I was young I worked several
blue-collar jobs (construction) and it was a very dysfunctional boys-club type
social environment as well, but in a different way.

I love what I do, but there's a lot of weirdos here. I try not to be one. :)

EDIT: Removed ignorant aspergers comment.

~~~
tomp
_> This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in
our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and
towards each other._

Apparently, it also manifests itself in taking things too seriously, not being
able to understand the nuanced meaning behind insulting words, and reducing a
person's personality to a few mean things he's said.

Nice sexist remark, btw.

~~~
naner
_Nice sexist remark_

My comment about men being more prone to unbalanced personality or are you
referring to something else?

~~~
tomp
Yes, for "[women] generally being more balanced personality-wise then men".

------
Xeoncross
Odd, I've never had a problem from the open source projects I've developed or
contributed too. In fact, I've made more friends from it than enemies.

I suppose the pressure of these projects is small compared to something
important like a driver or operating system... but perhaps that says more
about people than open source.

------
lukaslalinsky
I think this very much depends on your own attitude. Sure, there are assholes
who will say things about how useless is your project and how they hate you
for it, but this is not the norm in open source. And it's definitely not the
norm when it comes to developers, not users. I have worked with various people
in open source, including some that are known to be "not good at dealing with
people", but I never had a serious problem with them.

In fact, just a few weeks ago I had a wonderful experience contributing a
patch to cairo. You meet a new person and you are working together with the
goal of the best quality code. I was not doing much open source development
for some time and it was amazing how great it felt again.

------
meapix
I actually see that language as creative and funny, don't say because I'm not
the target audience. I forgot the comedian who said that he likes to cross the
line then come back to bring some people with him.

I appreciate the work that is being done in open source community, the
language part I don't really care much as long as it's to make a point. If you
don't like that community, why don't you just fork the kernel and call it
whatever you like. Nobody prevents you from doing that then you become the
jail keeper and show what you can do to the world.

------
msielski
Conflating the Open Source community at large with the Linux community, the
Linux development community, and the Linux kernel development community does
not help him make his case.

~~~
forgottenpass
Laying boycots, campaigns to fund a hitman via bitcoin and irc harassment at
the feet of Linus doesn't help either.

I won't argue that Linus' attitude has no influence in general, but the
categorical differences between this and Linus' hyperbole make it a red
herring for the conversation.

------
Alupis
> 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
> assholes, 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.

My jaw dropped. Feelings about systemd aside (I actually quite like it), this
is uncalled for, and outrageously bad.

Grow up! Hiring a hitman? Are you for real?

Anytime someone makes a large project that gets traction, people are going to
disagree; that does not make it acceptable to launch personal attacks, and
call for violence against the developer.

As a community, we need to call out the people doing this and show it's not
acceptable; irregardless of any politics that may be involved.

------
freshflowers
The problem with many self-organized groups of engineers is that they equate
meritocracy with technical contributions.

This is a very, very limited way of approaching the complex dynamics of people
working together. It shows up in many ways. Most open source communities are
not good places for people who can contribute design, documentation and god
forbid, people _management_ skills.

A pervasive illusion amongst software engineers is that we can do without
"soft" skills, and nowhere does this manifests itself more in places where no
boss or company forcefully adds those soft skills into the mix.

Some open source communities are lucky enough to have people that have both
the technical chops to get respect based on technically focused meritocratic
values and have other "management" skills. Most don't. So once conflict arises
(as it inevitably will, because they are human beings) and simple meritocracy
no longer suffices (because both sides are smart and contribute), the
community either breaks up or devolves into a permanent Lord of the Flies
atmosphere.

It has nothing to do with Open Source in general. It's the lack of value
placed on soft skills in tech driven meritocracies.

(You can see the same thing in tech start-ups founded by technies, but there
it usually gets quickly corrected after the first PR disaster.)

------
jingo
The author of this g+ post is the author of "systemd", a controversial new
program being installed by default into some of the most popular distributions
of the GNU/Linux operating system.

It seems that some Linux users are unhappy with systemd.

While I do not agree with any user being disrespectful to the author by
targeting him personally, the fact that users are seriously upset about
systemd as a program gives me hope for the future of the popular Linux
distributions.

When the author says "Open Source is awful" maybe he is revealing his true
colors. Perhaps he is better suited to closed source development which is
insulated from public review by users and other developers at-large. But that
is for him to decide.

There was a post on HN a little while back by the developer of a popular glibc
alernative for Linux who told us he has been using a flat, linear /etc/rc file
for over a decade and his boot times are substantially shorter than with
systemd. But more importantly, his approach is simple by comparison. How many
users will be able to debug systemd by examining the internals?

It is this type of "hands-on" user that gives me hope for the future of the
distributions that are experimenting with systemd. I hope these users will
speak up if they have not done so already.

------
jalfresi
The Linux kernal dev community is a community of rough tough programmer
bastards. If you can't handle the knocks there, maybe that's not the community
for you? I'm sure there are other less abrasive communities you can join? It
certainly says a lot about someone who believes that they are entitled to join
a community and to demand to have their voice heard and to have the community
adapt to their wants and desires. I believe that sort of influence is earned
within a community.

I mean, I wouldn't join /r/kkk and expect everyone to "chill out on the use of
the N word guys". Maybe, just maybe, I'm not as important to that community as
I believe myself to be?

Urgh, I can't believe I'm typing this, but the phrase "be the change you want
to see" applies for community membership. Be the beacon of conduct you want
the community to share. Inspire the community to aim for those ideals through
example.

Or write a snarky blog post about it because you're finding it difficult to
get mind share on an obviously flawed project.

~~~
jalfresi
Why the down vote? I never apologized for the violence leveled at him, just
that you are not entitled to be a member of any community, and that you cannot
expect the culture of a community to change simply because you want it to.

Communities require membership contribution to change. You want to change the
culture, you have to get involved. IF the communities culture is too poisonous
for you, then maybe that's not the community for you.

------
tessierashpool
Re this part, about Linus Torvalds being aggressive and insulting to his
contributors:

    
    
      But no, it's not an efficient way to run a community. If
      Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite,
      not because of this behaviour.
    

You have to have been utterly brilliant to invent git. I don't know enough
about operating system internals to say if the same is true for Linux, but I
know enough about git to say it's true for git.

So Linus was brilliant enough to invent git, and is widely known to be a
complete asshole to his contributors.

He rarely brags about being a genius - in fact I believe I've seen him on
video making modest statements about being overrated and not really that smart
- but he often argues that being an asshole to his contributors is a wise and
effective form of management.

To me, he seems like an epoch-definingly great hacker who nonetheless has
absolutely no clue what his own strengths and weaknesses are.

~~~
sbierwagen
I'm not sure git is an example of capital-G Genius, since Linus had been using
BitKeeper, a commercial distributed revision control system, for about five
years by the time he wrote git.

Git is good, but it's not new.

~~~
the_why_of_y
More importantly, Linus took a good look at Monotone, with which git has a lot
more in common than with BitKeeper... and the same is true of Matt
Mackall/Mercurial of course.

The incremental improvements in git/Mercurial were of course significant in
getting wide adoption.

------
r4pha
Huge egos and insults are things that have always bothered me in the OSS
community. Just some days ago the Crockford vs. fat thread on github
resurfaced and shocked a lot of people on HN [0]. It certainly has stopped
from releasing stuff in the past. Lately, though, I've been having an awesome
experience with a few of my really simple open source projects. I've been
receiving a few emails with requests in the most polite way possible, some of
them even thanking me for my small contribution. Recently I've even got a pull
request from a guy who out of the blue designed an icon for my android app.
These things are priceless to me, and certainly motivate me much more than the
bad parts demotivate me.

[0]
[https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5...](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5135512)

------
dr_zoidberg
This article reminded me of what Valerie Aurora[1] posted & discussed. She
called for feminism values, and Lennart is calling for less hate. I get the
feeling they are both talking of the same underlying problem.

On a personal note, when GIMP 2.6 first came out, I filled a bug report
pointing to the devs that under Windows XP sans SP2, the program would crash
on load. Instead of getting a real answer, I got some angry comments about not
updating my OS and a ban from the bug tracking system. Some time later, they
added Windows XP SP2 as a requirement. I still use GIMP, but whenever I find a
bug, I just wait patiently until the next version to see if they have fixed
it.

[1] HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180)

Edit: found the bug report, it was SP2, not SP1 as I first thought. Also fixed
some typos.

------
owenversteeg
Ehh, you just have to look past the arguments and inane people. I run a small-
to-medium open source project (the Min CSS framework,
[http://mincss.com](http://mincss.com)) and I get plenty of inane comments,
criticism, and personal attacks. However, I also get plenty of nice comments
that make it all worthwile. For a project as large as systemd, I imagine that
this is many orders of magnitude more extreme.

As with any group of people, the assholes are the loudest, and if you're
writing software for a huge group of people a bunch of them are going to be
really loud assholes.

------
tzakrajs
Welcome to the Internet? Hack with people irl and this happens way less often.

------
npsimons
This coming from the man who, when people point out flaws in his design of
systemd, says basically "too bad, I'm doing it anyway, and if you don't like
it, you can take a hike."

~~~
shabda
That sound like an entirely reasonable thing to say. If you don't like it, you
can choose to boycott his system.

It would become unreasonable if he opened his emails with " _YOU_ are full of
bullshit. "

~~~
npsimons
Ah, I see I've found yet another person who only reads the inflammatory email
by Torvalds, but doesn't bother to read the preceding thread where the person
Torvalds is addressing refused to admit his mistake, and further, insisted
that other people work around it.

------
issa
I think people might be overthinking the problem here. Whenever someone is
really good at one thing (say, programming), it is easy for them to get away
with being really bad at others (say, manners).

It's the same reason college athletes get away with breaking so many rules.

And both situations are very hard to solve due to the competing and
conflicting interests involved.

On a personal level, we should all try our best to stop people (ourselves
included) from being programmer bullies. And I've seen many people work very
hard to do so!

------
hippich
Never had to participate in linux kernel development, so can't really comment
on it (although I hear Linus can be rude).

But open source != linux kernel. There are so many small, large, medium
project, that if you really want to - you can find where to contribute. It
works the best when you actually need to fix something you use and you have
developer expertise to fix it. But even when you can describe in details bug
or feature - this is often is very welcomed by project maintainers.

------
vidoc
Hehe, around the line about the community being mainly about white males in
their 30's and 40's, I for some reason felt that the Hitler card was coming :P

------
cpach
This is a duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859)

------
DarkIye
The Open Source community is young, like the rest of the field of software
engineering, and we're still childish and uncivil towards one another, derived
from a root of individualism, fed by the promise of a vast and plentiful
uncharted territory.

Eventually we will install a system that will protect ourselves from one
another. I hope it's a good one.

On a more specific note, PulseAudio sucks and I could care less what Lennart
thinks.

------
psychometry
Desktop/non-mobile link:
[https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...](https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/J2TZrTvu7vd)

It's apparently impossible to go back to the desktop version from the mobile
page. The "View Desktop" link in the footer takes you to the G+ homepage. Well
done, Google.

------
kelvin0
Maybe video should replace written text in some of these exchanges. I think
that someone having to record themselves would make them think twice and maybe
rephrase some heinous language. Written word also has the disadvantage of not
conveying non-verbal body language and can also be misinterpreted. Not sure
this solution would be widely accepted though, unfortunately.

------
pknight
It's a shame that ones personal experiences result in generalizations that are
then attached to Open Source. People can and will be assholes in any kind of
project or group. That has not got a lot to do with Open Source. It would be
fairer to say: "I had many bad experiences with the Open Source communities I
was involved with".

------
matt_heimer
I've had some arguments with people but in large part it is pleasant to work
with most people in the open source world. I was just at JavaOne and
"everybody meets at conferences for beers" really does happen. For smaller
projects most developers are extremely happy when someone takes any interest
in their project.

------
rafa2000
Non Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this. You
have said nothing.

------
fareesh
Can someone here clue me in about why mailing lists still appear to be the de-
facto platform for communication for a lot of open source projects -
particularly those that are centered around kernel development and other low
level "stuff"?

~~~
kstrauser
Because the alternative is web forum software, none of which is as good at
thread management ("alert me to replies to this thread", "hide this thread",
"beep when Jane Smith posts") as a good email client. Also, email is
ubiquitous: you can follow and participate in conversations from a phone as
easily as a desktop. Finally, you only have to learn _one_ email client, and
can then use those skills on every mailing list you join. That's in contrast
with "project Foo uses SomeBoard v1.3 and has this new feature, but project
Bar uses SomeBoard v1.1 and doesn't have it yet. Project Baz uses OtherBoard
0.6 which has this one cool thing but lacks have the features of SomeBoard."

Remember, this is the same group of people that gets passionately whipped up
about text editors. Can you imagine them _not_ having strong opinions about
forum interfaces? Defaulting to good old email and letting everyone use their
interface of choice is probably the only practical way to get everyone to
participate.

------
avinassh
discussion about petition on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3385276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3385276)

------
lukeschlather
Previous discussion with a less flame-bait title:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859)

------
arca_vorago
I just want to point out that there needs to be a more clear distinction
between "open source" and FOSS "Free open source software". They are two very
different things, and I have found that while there are fundamental issues
rearing their ugly head in the development model (many eye's theory is on it's
last leg, which is why I push the reduced code theory, which is just my made
up theory), much of the vitriol happens in the "open source" community and
less so in the FOSS community.

The title is a bad on because it lacks this distinction.

------
DonHopkins
The thing that is awful about "Open Source" is that it was a term coined by
Eric S Raymond in order to attack Richard Stallman and the Free Software
Foundation, and to make a name and money for himself as a so-called "hacker",
without actually having to write any useful code, or even read anybody else's
code and report bugs with his very own "millions of I's".

If you want to see how the Open Source fish rots from the head down, you have
to look no further than Eric Raymond's own blog: "In the U.S., blacks are 12%
of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think
this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than
the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact
independent of skin color."
[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129)

Or in his own words: "And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in
asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat
to make you feel extra special welcome."
[http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet.org/)

"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun."
When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility.
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond)

"Ego is for little people" "[bla bla bla...] I’ve blown up the software
industry once, reinvented the hacker culture twice, and am without doubt one
of the dozen most famous geeks alive. Investment bankers pay me $300 an hour
to yak at them because I have a track record as a shrewd business analyst. I
don’t even have a BS, yet there’s been an entire academic cottage industry
devoted to writing exegeses of my work. I could do nothing but speaking tours
for the rest of my life and still be overbooked. [...bla bla bla]" (...and on
and on ad nausium -- he really needs to work on his BS!)
[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404)

The hacker culture can do just fine without ESR's "reinventions", thank you.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728146)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727953)

~~~
Curmudgel
Don't forget HIV denial:

"I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of
unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for
essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole
pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the
history of medicine."

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184)

------
peterwwillis
Poettering's M.O. is basically to force people to adopt changes that piss off
a lot of people, and then whine when he doesn't get his way or he gets push
back by standards boards who aren't interested in his personal agenda. Keep
flouncing, Lennart. I'm sure this is the best way to get people to be nice to
you or adopt your changes.

~~~
wffurr
I liked your original pre-edit comment, since it portrayed your attitude even
better:

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahaha

Was about to argue the merit of this post, then noticed the author. Almost got
me, Poettering ;-) Just another social/political manipulation to get his way
at the expense of others. I would feel bad for the guy if he wasn't such a
whiny prick the rest of the time."

I especially like how you admit that if this letter was anonymous, you would
actually consider the argument, but since it's a particular person you
dislike, you're OK with people advocating violence and attempting to hire
hitmen.

Stay classy.

~~~
peterwwillis
Yeah, I figured explaining my opinion was more valid than the verbal diahhrea
I initially concocted. But since I never took a position on whether his
treatment was fair, I think your attempt to paint me as an advocate of
violence is a lot less classy. To be clear, it's not that I dislike him
personally, it's that he's an open source troll and this is just more
trolling. I'm sure he's a lovely person when he isn't shitting on Linux.

~~~
EmanueleAina
Lennart is producing lots of software that many people find useful to solve
real problems.

If you don't have these problems you're free to not use them.

If your distro maintainer choose to integrate with software produced by
Lennart it's because it either solves real problems for them or are simply too
dumb to be trusted.

In the first case it would be appropriate to trust the decision of qualified
people, but if you fall in the latter care you're still free to change distro
given the assumed incompetence of your maintainers.

I still don't see how this makes Lennart a troll.

~~~
peterwwillis
> If you don't have these problems you're free to not use them.

Uh, no. Major distributions have adopted his software into the core of their
product and it is virtually impossible to substitute it. These distros happen
to be the only approved vendors for most major private and public sector
commercial software. We're not free to not use it.

> you're still free to change distro given the assumed incompetence of your
> maintainers

See above.

> I still don't see how this makes Lennart a troll.

Besides the fact that most of the Linux kernel dev team thinks he and his
cronies are asshats? Besides the way he's designed his software to be the
polar opposite model of the operating system he's building it for? Besides the
fact that he's insulting all of the people he purports to write software for
and with, ignoring the fact that almost no one else has been treated this way?

Besides all of that, it's a troll because he's basically just said 'fuck you'
to everyone who develops open source software and now his fanboys and
detractors are all arguing over it. It's a very effective troll indeed.

~~~
EmanueleAina
If those major distributions have adopted it they may have had some reasons to
do so, isn't it?

So you basically don't trust the maintainers of major distribution, yet you
rely on them to provide certificated support (which I guess is the reason why
you require approval).

This is a problem in your organization and has really nothing to do with
Lennart.

I share the opinion that some people in the kernel team should reconsider the
way they express themseves, but if you judge based on who has not been
insulted on LKML you'd be left with _very few_ people. Linus himself recently
said that he has no strong opinion on systemd and in fact uses it.

I won't discuss your accusation that his software is "the polar opposite model
of the operating system he's building it for", it's just your idea of said OS
and probably doesn't match what the majority of the developers of said OS
think.

We probably read very differently what Lennart said, but I'm quite sure e
didn't say "'fuck you' to everyone who develops open source software".

------
c3d
+1. But then, is it necessary? Jobs and Gates were not exactly moderate, as
far as we know.

~~~
danielweber
They weren't managing volunteer communities.

~~~
tomp
They weren't giving their software away for free either.

------
jchonphoenix
Communities with corporate stewards are a lot more civil for obvious reasons

------
tschellenbach
Seriously why would you work on open source if the community is that bad. It's
not open source in general though. Some projects are great fun to work on.
Just change which project you're working on.

------
imanaccount247
This trend towards using victim status from trolls as a shield to ignore real
criticism is really unfortunate. Linus's criticism of redhat and redhat
employees is perfectly reasonable and valid. Trying to distract attention from
it and pretend he is just some evil bully nobody should listen to is
incredibly childish and counter productive.

------
notastartup

        The Linux community is dominated by western, white, 
        straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days.
    

Could it be that this is a purely cultural thing? If the fish rots from the
head, then isn't something about the culture to be blame? Outside of race but
purely from a group of straight males who are probably sexually repressed,
beta male, grew up in a individualistic society free to express oneself
naturally give rise to such Spartan environment?

Imagine if the linux community consisted mostly of Korean or Japanese males,
both countries with strong Neo-confucian values of social hierarchy and mutual
respect, avoiding harsh words. But maybe such culture are not apt at producing
new ideas but retaining old ones.

------
powertower
More info that points to what caused all the hate -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering)

------
nilved
I read this article and was very confused about how somebody could create an
open source project that lead to actual death threads. Then I googled Lennart
Poettering and it all made sense. PulseAudio and systemd make for a
particularly wretched resume: Poettering is probably responsible for more
frustration to Linux users than anybody else right now. Not that I'm not going
to condone online harassment or blame the victim, but I am a little happy that
this harassment is based on technical merits instead of appearance or sexual
orientation as is normally the case.

~~~
lallysingh
Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any
distribution to use them. Yet the software seems quite popular.

Sometimes someone has to step up to do the dirty work and write software that
can only give mediocre results. I think he's getting flack as the scapegoat
for the general consumerization of Linux (ala ubuntu, gnome, etc).

Really, if people don't like these systems, or if they weren't worth the
trouble, why not do something about it? They sound like itches that could be
scratched. That was the spirit of a previous, less popular open source
movement. Now it's full of useless bitching assholes who will spend 10x the
time complaining over time actually fixing.

Note: I'm not saying that you personally are in that category. But this guy
should be able to respond with "fix it, fork it, or fuck off."

~~~
brockers
>> Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any
distribution to use them.

This is simply not true. Both systems were effectively pushed down everybody's
throats because RedHat (through Fedora) made it that way. There were lots of
competing options that we NEVER going to get consideration because they were
"not invented here."

That is the thing that frustrates people most about him. That he may be a good
developer, but what he does has less to do with engineering merit and more to
do with politics.

~~~
lallysingh
(I'm not asking combatitively, I'm genuinely curious)

Wouldn't RedHat be the one to blame here? And the complicity of other distro
vendors who also included it? RedHat doesn't back KDE, but KDE does quite
well.

------
pikachu_is_cool
Fourteen year old kids were telling me that they were going to skullfuck my
grandmother with a rake over Xbox Live, a decade ago, just because I killed
them once or twice in Halo 2. Internet insults have always been ridiculously
over the top, it's nothing new. Nobody is actually going to rape or kill her
over this, you're a massive idiot if you think for even a split second that
they would.

~~~
oldmanjay
It does seem like there's an awful lot of energy being expended on stopping 14
year old boys from being assholes. I suspect it's about as likely to work as
efforts to stop teenagers from having sex. At least quixotic quests are
entertaining from the sidelines.

~~~
mcantor
This post was about grown men, not fourteen-year-olds. Grown men... as in,
people who should know better.

~~~
oldmanjay
Oh of course. But I was responding to a particular comment, so context is
important.

------
mike_ivanov
Anything is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this.

------
qwerta
If it is so bad, do not use it!

One could always pay $1000/hour and get his software from someone with correct
attitude, sex, race and age. If you pay $0 do not complain!

------
digital-rubber
Systemd and PulseAudio are getting pushed down everybody's throat, unasked
for. They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced
way prematurely and buggy.

Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people
it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for
distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it
was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man
for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to
infect nearly all distributions with systemd.

And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the
nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain
distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement
something new, without giving it some proper thought. It's a task, work where
their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any
other term you think applies! That's what is wrong with people, we are all a
bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying
for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by
choosing the life of suffering. It's in our nature.

Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew
working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a
product as i don't want to use another insulting term, as the author
apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post
as he did, if you DO NOT care).

If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i
would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many
people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need
address so much bitching about your 'stuff' and still feel like stuffing it
down everybody's throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There
were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that
effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY?

Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering
would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared
and or opposed by many, deal with it.

~~~
cookiecaper
>They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way
prematurely and buggy.

The community invites you to produce something superior. PulseAudio and
systemd may have their own problems, but they're in place for a reason. I
don't think they were selected due to some irrational hero worship for
Poettering; they were selected because they were the most concise way to solve
a real problem.

As much as one may dislike Pulse, it provides a unified, modern audio system
that just works. I don't know if you remember the bad old days when it was a
fight to get applications to play audio correctly, but that has gone away with
the introduction of Pulse. For all of its potential problems and
inefficiencies, it provides the basics in a reasonably accessible and
universal manner.

>And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD.

It is optional. Open-source means you can run your own distro completely free
of Poeterring's touch. You may have to deal with the legacy left by his
projects, but that's nothing special; he had to deal with the legacy of ALSA
et al and wrote compatibility layers that were major factors in the successful
proliferation of PulseAudio.

>The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should
happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the
person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought.

I'm sure the nerds that are entrusted with the security and sanity of millions
of systems across the world would disagree about whether "proper thought" was
involved.

I don't really see a point in addressing the rest of your reply. Disagreement
is fine, but please be civil. Poeterring and others in the community are
obviously capable and they deserve acknowledgement and respect, which is a
different thing than deference or worship. If you disagree, please disagree,
but do so with civility. This shouldn't have to be complicated.

~~~
digital-rubber
Please read the reply below to snowwrestler, check the PDF. As i think it also
applies here.

Also please don't put to much faith in the people that roll the packages. It's
a kind of dangerous assumption, see history for examples.

Also i fail to see where i have not been civil, I've tried so very hard. Not a
single F-word in there ;-)

I agree it wouldn't have to be complicated at all, if simply a new distro was
created fully based and compliant with the ideas of systemd, until its mature
enough for others to adopt. Instead of overwriting the existing with something
that certainly is not proven to be better or best for the job. And many are
entering a road where they are not even sure systemd is going to end taking
over things, unifying things, making all distros the same.

