Now Poettering's feelings are hurt

[nrc]

Lennart Poettering has posted a whine to G+ about how mean everyone's being to him.

 

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13rdjryqyn1xlt3522sxpugoz3gujbhh04

 

He blames this on the open source community and calls out Linus Torvalds specifically for setting a bad example. 

 

Of course Poettering fails to attribute any blame to his own history of being rude, obnoxious, and dismissive of anyone that disagrees with him.

 

I don't condone threats of harm or violence but welcome to the Internet, Lennart.  Yes, there are stupid and immature people in nearly every community, the Open Source community included.   But it's pathetic to suggest that these behaviors are somehow specific to the Open Source community or that Linus Torvalds bears some responsibility. 

 

Yes, Torvalds can be blunt but in all the cases where I've seen him lambaste someone, it's been a judgement on the quality of their work.  Don't develop software for public consumption if you don't want criticism of your work.

 

I think that's really the root of this rant.  Poettering believes that his work should be above criticism.  He feels like the adoption of systemd is proof of that when it's largely the result of funding and political machinations.

 

Thank drobbins we have an alternative.  Hopefully the rest of the Linux world will wake up eventually.

[Tassie_Tux]

You nailed it:

Of course Poettering fails to attribute any blame to his own history of being rude, obnoxious, and dismissive of anyone that disagrees with him.

 

Poettering believes that his work should be above criticism.  He feels like the adoption of systemd is proof of that when it's largely the result of funding and political machinations.

... yes, and if we are critical or disagree we are apparently 'haters'. :wacko:

 

I did not 'hate' Lennart before, however reading his G+ whine encourages me to start!  :P

 

I am reminded of a child throwing a tantrum because they did not get their own way. Having no intentions to ever talk about this again on a public forum is very arrogant. No right of reply, no debate. I actually find this part the worst. 

 

Obviously I cannot speak of the challenges that our Funtoo Developers have previously faced or currently face. What I can say is that as a Funtoo User, the community that Lennart is describing is not the Funtoo Linux that I have come to know. This is not a 'fortunate' thing. This is instead a reflection of the good people that are together making Funtoo Linux great.  :D

[sputnik]

+1

[meister]

While I think that Lennart could have responded in the past with more respect, I also believe that he's taken quite a beating from the community the past few years. Let's face it, he's the most hated person in the Linux community right now, and systemd is the most heated subject across the open source forums and community. 

 

If someone was bashing my project as much as they are, I might have times where I act irrational because I'm so sick of people criticizing my baby. Remember he's still pretty young, and may not act as mature as we might expect but I don't believe he deserves as much hate as he's getting.

 

Just my 2 cents.

[spectromas]

He's a paid employee isn't he? If he is then he should start acting like it. 

[haxmeister]

I have to say that although he's arrogant and publicly a prick (don't know him personally), the work he's doing would be considered a contribution if it weren't being forced down our throats.

[j-g-]

I have to say that although he's arrogant and publicly a prick (don't know him personally), the work he's doing would be considered a contribution if it weren't being forced down our throats.

No one is forcing anything, you chose Funtoo and you don't have to use it, the thing is, code does more than rant threads like this, you say Lennart is publicly a prick? Yeah that prick who has written more free software than anyone on this thread and put it available for free. and guess what? people chose to use it.

 

 

He's a paid employee isn't he? If he is then he should start acting like it.

 

He's indeed a paid employee who works to make what I think he likes the most: write free software. I don't know, but I don't think any if you given the chance(and being ~25) would turn down a Red Hat job offer, and if you did, clearly you would be very stupid, anyway, working for someone doesn't take away your freedom of speech(Sorry if you don't have that in your country), you can post whatever you want in your personal social media, and Lennart most of the time post technical and interesting stuff in his blog, unlike the insightful analogies between filming porn and developing free software I've read in this forum[1].

 

It's true saying today 'if you don't like systemd make your own', is stupid, given how much development systemd has had, but, the 'Rethinking PID 1' post[2] that was published in the beginnings of systemd, and describes the vision of the development, was four years ago, and none of the people that has been ranting since then, did anything more than that, just rant. And many others, those who knew what is useful to change, wrote code, but they did it for systemd(also upstart and OpenRC, but clearly they where less).

 

Anyway, This post is getting too long, So...

 

:wq

 

[1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

[2] http://forums.funtoo.org/index.php?/topic/111-gnome-312-is-here/?p=571

 

PD: Code says and does more than prose when it comes to software.

[drobbins]

Nothing from Lennart is unusual for a young male geek, but that doesn't mean that his approach is not harmful to the Linux community.

 

A lot of distributions were strong-armed into using systemd to maintain compatibility with GNOME, and this hasn't bothered Lennart one bit, and it should have. 

 

I agree with several comments in earlier threads. Funtoo will remain a non-systemd system and will eventually be upgrading OpenRC to be competitive with systemd.

 

Frankly, GNOME 3.6 worked quite a bit better than GNOME 3.12. I had tabbed terminal windows and a few other things were cleaner. So it's not always extremely useful to follow GNOME's latest release. I do like the general design of GNOME 3 but in some ways they seem to be continually regressing.

[nrc]

No one is forcing anything, you chose Funtoo and you don't have to use it, the thing is, code does more than rant threads like this, you say Lennart is publicly a prick? Yeah that prick who has written more free software than anyone on this thread and put it available for free. and guess what? people chose to use it.

 

RedHat has paid Poettering to develop a lot of code and then given it away for free.  So what?  That doesn't exempt him from criticism for his bad ideas and behavior.  Poettering hasn't developed as much code as Linus but Poettering doesn't seem to feel that puts Torvalds beyond criticism.

 

Most people haven't chosen systemd.  They chose a distro.   Poettering, his funders, and supporters were successful at coercing most major distros into adopting systemd through a combination of political manoeuvring and threats that anyone who didn't fall in line would be rendered "irrelevant" as systemd consumed every project it touched and became a dependency for everything.

 

The average user doesn't understand UNIX programming principles or how much of what is good about Linux stems from them.  So of course they're not going to immediately dump their favorite distro just on principle.

 

It's true that efforts to create alternatives to systemd have been slow to organize.  Until the coup in the Debian technical committee there were certain to be alternatives to systemd and there was no threat that Poettering could continue to force dependencies beyond projects driven by RedHat.  That safety net is now gone.  If people want any alternative to systemd they're going to have to do something about it.

 

I don't think Poettering's little sob story was as random and pointless as it seems.  I believe that he was trying to provoke one of Torvald's patented "piss off" rants so that the can play the victim and court sympathy in his future dealings with the kernel community.  His accusations of racism and sexism in the kernel community are designed to start lining up sympathetic victims.  Expect more bad ideas from Poettering soon.

[j-g-]

RedHat has paid Poettering to develop a lot of code and then given it away for free.  So what?  That doesn't exempt him from criticism for his bad ideas and behavior.  Poettering hasn't developed as much code as Linus but Poettering doesn't seem to feel that puts Torvalds beyond criticism.

 

Most people haven't chosen systemd.  They chose a distro.   Poettering, his funders, and supporters were successful at coercing most major distros into adopting systemd through a combination of political manoeuvring and threats that anyone who didn't fall in line would be rendered "irrelevant" as systemd consumed every project it touched and became a dependency for everything.

The two distros that put effort on systemd initially OpenSUSE and Fedora(Red Hat), aren't bigger in manpower, than the combination of Arch. Debian(and derivates), Gentoo, Canonical, and Slackware, developer comunities, I don't see how being majority 4 years ago distros that didn't used systemd, were politically forced to use it, the man power was there, if they would have wanted the organization of a better and moder init system would have happened. The political argument doesn't make practical sense.

[nrc]

The two distros that put effort on systemd initially OpenSUSE and Fedora(Red Hat), aren't bigger in manpower, than the combination of Arch. Debian(and derivates), Gentoo, Canonical, and Slackware, developer comunities, I don't see how being majority 4 years ago distros that didn't used systemd, were politically forced to use it, the man power was there, if they would have wanted the organization of a better and moder init system would have happened. The political argument doesn't make practical sense.

 

systemd supporters use "modern init system" as a synonym for systemd.  To them, systemd is a modern init system and a modern init system must be systemd.   This presumes that a "modern init system" is one that takes over a whole host of functions that have been accomplished effectively for decades by independent utilities interacting with one another.  Of course this bit of nonsense is a product of Poettering's thinking.  One might surmise that the idea comes from the fact that he doesn't play well with others so he would rather just control everything his project touches.   It's simply not true that all of that is necessary for a "modern init system".

 

The need for a "modern init system" in the Poettering style presumes that he is correct in his belief that there are all sorts of things that simply can't be accomplished without a "modern init system."   There were other init systems in development prior to systemd, they just didn't work on the premise that it was within their purview to replace anything but the actual init system.

 

The political aspect of this is clear.  Redhat and Novell are the largest contributers to key pieces of the stack. In many cases they empoy the maintainers of those pieces.  So when RedHat employee Poettering decides that udev should be absorbed into systemd RedHat employee Sievers says "Why yes, of course it should."  Thus leaving any distro that isn't inclined to adopt systemd in a quandary.   Repeat that process with multiple pieces of GNOME and pretty soon you leave distro maintainers with few options.

 

For the community to replace the effort of these paid developers takes time.  Even if they don't agree with the choices that Poettering and company are making, they're not willing to cede their position as "major distros" to wait for alternatives to arrive - particularly with Poettering making it clear that he intended to do everything he could to make alternatives impractical, if not impossible.

 

The decision for Debian was also political but came from an entirely different perspective.  systemd advocates used simmering resentment toward Canonical's use of Debian for commercial purposes to lead free software advocates down the garden path of dependence on a RedHat controlled stack.  Fortunately dissension continues and there's now a move to call for a general resolution to forbid Debian packages from depending on a specific init system.  Hopefully that will move forward and succeed.

 

This isn't an "evil corporate conspiracy."  I think most of these people believe that they're doing good for the community. They just have well funded bad ideas.

[spectromas]

This isn't an "evil corporate conspiracy."  I think most of these people believe that they're doing good for the community. They just have well funded bad ideas.

 

I can't see how you can say this, your whole post detailed the corporate backed reasons for what has happened and where we are, I don't see any reason to suggest it is not a corporate conspiracy of some order. If corporations are backing the direction that is being taken then there is a reason they are backing it, they believe it will make money, that it is an investment. I don't see anything about the community being a factor here except what it will do for these corporations. 

 

This is the point I was trying to make about him being a paid employee, there seems to be a mixed up understanding about what he is doing and what lots of other people do in the open source world. He is being paid to do what he is doing. If he doesn't like his work place then he can leave, he's not there for the good of anyone else except himself and his bank balance, or at least that is what I can only assume. He's not working for free or for community benefit at all, he is following corporate objectives. Whether you think they are just bad ideas or a conspiracy of some kind is very open to debate. 

 

And to respond to a previous comment, no, I don't think he is entitled to speak his mind about whatever he likes on social media, the general public often to not enjoy this freedom (lots of people have been fired for venting the frustrations from their work place in social media), he should act professionally about his work environment and not post rants like this publicly, but then this was always intended to be very open and loud in the first place, with him being the corporate face and tool (and scapegoat). 

[nrc]

I can't see how you can say this, your whole post detailed the corporate backed reasons for what has happened and where we are, I don't see any reason to suggest it is not a corporate conspiracy of some order. If corporations are backing the direction that is being taken then there is a reason they are backing it, they believe it will make money, that it is an investment. I don't see anything about the community being a factor here except what it will do for these corporations.

 

Yes, corporate funding and organization have enabled systemd to get where it is.   But did the corporate entities drive that for their own benefit or are they simply supporting wrong-headed people with bad ideas?   I tend to believe the latter but I certainly wouldn't argue strongly against the former.