
Thank You Lennart - mwcampbell
https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2014/10/thanks-lennart.html
======
anonbanker
Meh.

There was a reason he got so much vitriol: he's a terrible and manipulative
person who is using political methods to push an anti-POSIX agenda. He's a
Weev-level troll for an audience too stupid to realize the damage he's doing.
He over-exaggerates a joke on IRC into a perceived attempt/threat on his life,
and uses that as a springboard to insult Linus Torvalds for doing far more
benign things than he regularly commits, whilst playing the victim card to the
fullest.

I'll join the author in thanking lennart. Thank you for holding the Linux
ecosystem back by politically forcing your bad monolithic software on us.
Thank you for showing that not only Microsoft can implement
"embrace/extend/extinguish" to ruin Linux. Thank you for showing the world how
to use an open source company like red hat to muscle your changes into other
distributions. Thank you for reinventing JACK's wheel. Thank you for
introducing a new paper cut for every one Mark Shuttleworth endeavored to fix.
Thank you for saying that people that disagree with you must obviously "hate
the disabled" because they don't agree with your decisions.

And most importantly, thank you for showing how gullible and vulnerable the
open source movement is. Not even Microsoft hurt Linux as much as you have,
and this is with SCO vs. IBM in mind.

The next time I see him, I plan on telling him this verbatim.

~~~
mwcampbell
I agree with the OP and with jerven's reply. Just one question: What makes
POSIX, and Unix in general, so sacred that an anti-POSIX agenda is inherently
a terrible thing, worth being opposed with such vitriol? Unix is just one way
of many to put together an operating system. If the major GNU/Linux
developers, inspired by Mr. Poettering, want to try a different direction,
they're entitled to do that.

~~~
anonbanker
It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. What made unices popular
was their ubiquitousness. If you had a BSD machine on the same network as a
Linux or SunOS machine, they can communicate using standard protocols.
Further, the applications themselves were portable between POSIX
implementations.

The Unix Way is to have small programs that do one thing extremely well; when
an application (with the exception of emacs) starts emulating Zawinski's Law,
they're usually broken up into smaller pieces. I do not want one app that
handles cd, ls, pwd, rm, mv, etc. I suspect that if Poettering/Sievers
released an app (let's call it "fileD") that did exactly that, the Unix
community would gather the torches and pitchforks to go put an end to the
nonsense.

Kinda like they're doing right now with systemd.

A Unix that does not implement or respect POSIX is not Unix. And if the major
GNU/Linux developers wanted to try a different direction, they can. But they
don't. The majority of developers want to keep Linux this way. two engineers
from Red Hat want it this way, and politics are driving it's adoption rather
than technical merit.

~~~
cbd1984
> Further, the applications themselves were portable between POSIX
> implementations.

It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. Application source
portability was never absolute, not by a long shot, back when Sun and SGI and
HP were still relevant to what Unix was. They all had value-add APIs, little
different ways of doing things which were deliberately different from everyone
else's to encourage lock-in. And even disregarding that, the BSD/SysV split
was even stronger then than it is now, with heterodox APIs like STREAMS still
in use.

Linux and the Open Source BSDs are still different, but the standards are
better-followed and the auto-configuration tools are better.

~~~
anonbanker
> It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing.

I understand that you're doing this out of malice, and are using "reflection"
in order to make yourself feel superior, and to take me down a peg, but I do
regret using that sentence in the GP. The rest of the post was completely
accurate, and that sentence diminished it.

However, I'll have to disagree with the rest of your reply; The BSD/SysV
split, while large, is fairly comparable to what's going on today with
systemd. Poettering has made his contempt for *BSD very clear multiple times,
and is actively trying to extinguish compatibility with it.

GNOME needs massive work to play nice with any BSD now, thanks to Lennart.
Porting between SunOS/IRIX/HP-UX was far less work than GNOME now requires.

