Lennart Poettering on the state of open source communities

https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/J2TZrTvu7vd

by omnibrain • 12 years ago

211 169 12 years ago

plus.google.com

chris_wot• 12 years ago

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

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

mercurial5• 12 years ago

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

1: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634

_delirium2• 12 years ago

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

anonbanker3• 12 years ago

For those paying attention, that above lkml thread ended with Sarah Sharp stating that she'll bring and distribute pot brownies to everyone on stage at linuxconf. No word on whether GKH or Linus enjoyed them. :-)

thejosh• 12 years ago

The Drupal community is pretty damn good too.

jiggy20112• 12 years ago

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

mercurial5• 12 years ago

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

jiggy20112• 12 years ago

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

seba_dos12• 12 years ago

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

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

mercurial5• 12 years ago

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

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

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Folks from those communities have tied up this debate to their identities.

http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

seba_dos12• 12 years ago

There are always extremes like that, even when dealing with the most innocent topics you could imagine. People can even react similarly with death threats over a change in cartoon TV show that they didn't like. In any sufficiently large community you will find some small percentage of such people, it's nothing exclusive to init systems or even tech as a whole.

And it's absolutely not "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, therefore it's OK"! It's never OK. It's rather "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, so he should be at least prepared for that and not act like he's surprised".

chronid2• 12 years ago

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

xorcist2• 12 years ago

We're talking about init systems here

I think the background for this has more to do with Avahi and PulseAudio than systemd.

VLM3• 12 years ago

"We're talking about init systems here, not the Palestine/Israel conflict."

To provide some background, that's actually a pretty good analogy, not to trivialize the middle east but to point out that forcing the adoption of one specific piece of software using an embrace extend extinguish business model is a traditional Microsoft tactic, and a lot of people in the linux community still see MS as their greatest enemy, fight to the death, etc.

The style of how systemd is being shoved down our unwilling throats is well optimized to generate the largest possible community firestorm at every step. Why someone would intentionally choose that rollout strategy, knowing the likely results, is a mystery. That social decision probably doesn't result in him getting added to many Christmas card lists (understatement).

ben0x5395• 12 years ago

It's not suddenly somehow his fault that there's people out there who take code being posted to the internet as a reason to harass and threaten someone, even if he did post that code to the internet by himself.

The community ought to rally around him and ostracize people who take it from "technical disagreement" to "personal attacks", not wring their collective hands about how it's really unavoidable and/or his own fault. A community that implicitly condones such behavior is complicit, even if only a minority actively engages in it.

XorNot3• 12 years ago

Agreed with this, but I suspect the problem is no one's really sure how you react to things like this. There's no centralized body or medium for "out of band" issues - it's kind of the nature of open source.

I would say it does speak to the need for community managers, but again, a difficult ask for OSS projects. Who, when, how and what powers do they have?

anon4• 12 years ago

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

zimpenfish2• 12 years ago

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

jessaustin• 12 years ago

Are you trying to win an irony award?

dimman2• 12 years ago

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

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

ben0x5395• 12 years ago

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

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

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

dimman2• 12 years ago

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

exDM69• 12 years ago

I'm very grateful that Lennart Poettering wrote this post. I don't necessarily use the software he writes (my next distro will be systemd based) but I'm still happy that he writes it. It has advanced the state of Linux distributions (due to PulseAudio, lots of ALSA driver bugs were found and fixed, systemd has prompted improvements to other init/acpid/udev/automount/etc software too) regardless whether you use the software he wrote or not.

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

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

laumars7• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

dbaupp• 12 years ago

I could write a lengthy blog post about the unnecessary problems that PulseAudio and systemd have thrown up over the years (problems I'd never had an issue with in all the years of running Linux and other UNIX-like platforms), but those topics are done to death now

I haven't been keeping up with the linux side of things, could someone give some links to descriptions of this?

csirac2• 12 years ago

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

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

Sammi• 12 years ago

However my point is I think Lennart's been so carelessly cavalier in rolling out his code, and so unapologetic about the shitstorm he started that he's gotten a lot of peoples back up. Obviously this doesn't warrant the kind of bullying that he discussed in his post; however although he doesn't deserve such attacks, he has largely brought them on himself.

That is the "look what she's wearing" argument. The victim is newer responsible for receiving such violent abuse as Pottering has.

joelthelion• 12 years ago

his contributions towards open source have brought far more problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace.

If this were true, nobody would have adopted his work. If most of the major distros have switched to pulseaudio and systemd, it's because the people who actually know about this stuff have looked at his work and found it excellent.

morganvachon4• 12 years ago

The thing is, he is a bully too. I also don't advocate the hate speech and threats he has received; no one deserves that. But his contributions to the world of GNU/Linux have been a net negative in my opinion. I get less benefit and more headache out of systemd, so I don't use a distro that has it. It's the same with PulseAudio; I think it's a good idea in concept but it was simply a bad implementation. He needs to hear that, but without the vitriol that accompanies it from certain people.

Will he ever listen even to good constructive criticism? Probably not; his personality seems to be egocentric and elitist, and as I said he can be quite the bully himself. But I'd imagine he would at least read constructive criticism, rather than dismiss it outright as he would (and should) dismiss hate filled criticism.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

"But the amount of flak he receives is unacceptable"

So, did he never question why is that? Other comments explain this better, but he's creating more problems than solving them.

" If you have a technical reason to disagree"

Not all reasons are technical, but a lot of it has to do with shortsightedness. People don't care how PulseAudio does things, but they care that it works (at least as good and reliably as ALSA), and is it here that it's failed.

Same thing for systemd, based on average reliability of what LP writes we're going to have uptimes of days...

Several other projects took flak (KDE 4.0 comes to mind) but they addressed the criticism

theflubba2• 12 years ago

Do you even know who Pottering is? He deserves all this hate.

kjs33• 12 years ago

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

Sorry, but have you by any chance seen how he treats people? Respect is a two way street.

mickrussom3• 12 years ago

Unix always ruled because it sucked simply. Now with lennart crapperings rubbish, unix can now suck the same way big fat stupid commercial bloated OSen suck.

Simple elegance vs bloat and complexity. Welcome to Lennarts world.

mappu• 12 years ago

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

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

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

flohofwoe5• 12 years ago

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

Argorak5• 12 years ago

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

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

flohofwoe5• 12 years ago

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

ben0x5395• 12 years ago

I don't think he's calling everyone an asshole or decrying all open source communities. He's saying assholes exist, and pointing out systemic reasons for why they're attracted and tolerated and why they're particularly harmful.

Even his personal criticism of Linus Torvalds is pretty specifically about an aspect of Torvalds' "community management style", not him as a person or his moral character or his work in general. It's also not a particularly wild analysis, I've seen that general sort of point made in all kinds of discussions, here on HN and elsewhere.

flohofwoe5• 12 years ago

Fair point. But as it stands, if it would be such a big problem in the Linux community, there wouldn't be a community in the first place since everybody would be deeply offended by now and have left. This would especially have been a problem early when the project was still small, and as far as I know Linus Torvalds always had this special leadership style. I don't know any of the involved persons personally, I don't know how they are in real life, but personally I found Linus Torvald's rage posts mostly amusing, sometimes even Monty-Python-style hilarious. If I deliver some really fucked up code or design I prefer feedback in the style of 'you badly fucked up, and here is why' instead of some politically correct bullshitting.

dalke5• 12 years ago

I believe the point is that the Linux community does nothing or even encourages non-destructive assholes. There's no shortage of assholes who are good at what they do.

Similarly, "drama queen" is a larger category than "drama queens which don't help solve problems but only create new ones." It's easily possible to be a drama queen who solves problems. Personally, I find it hard to read a quote like "[someone who decided to] read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted" and not see it as anything other than a exaggerated and dramatic statement, which kinda fits the definition of a drama queen. Do you think it is a normal and non-dramatic response to reading a byte at a time?

The author also commented on your statement "otherwise Linux wouldn't be in the state it is" by writing "it's not an efficient way to run a community. If Linux had success, then that certainly happened __despite__, not because of this behaviour."

Certainly there's any number of successful racist, sexist, or fill-in-the-blank-ist organizations. Success should not be used to justify bad behavior (except for certain cases where the discrimination is a bona fide reason for the success, such as hiring only women for a topless club - but you are not making the point that assholes and drama queens are required for the success of Linux). To do so is to commit the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

flohofwoe5• 12 years ago

That was very well written, much better then I would be able to express myself in english :) From my personal experience working in software project teams (not so much open source projects), there's a certain type of personality which can destroy a team or a project. Usually this type of person is charismatic, convinced of him/herself that they can't do wrong, has only a few years of real-world development experience, is extremely touchy about criticism, takes everything personally (no matter how the criticism is communicated), and starts scheming inside and outside the team. That's my definition of 'destructive asshole' and 'drama queen'. I only encountered very few cases where such a person is really useful for the project, and I don't know people with decades of experience exposing such character traits. It's usually 'young whizkids fresh from university' (only a few of course!).

the_mitsuhiko• 12 years ago

I don't know much of the drama around systemd, but this sounds like a typical "everyone's an asshole except me" post.

He's discussing technical topics, there is no point in having such responses coming to one just because of a technical disagreement. For what it's worth, I have stuff flying my way too because I do not agree with the direction Python is doing and I don't think the tone that flies my way sometimes is justified.

regularfry• 12 years ago

Except that it's not just a technical disagreement. Or at least, his detractors don't see it as one, and if he tries to characterise it as one he's being hopelessly naive. He's seen as using his political position to force through a technical solution, regardless of its merits.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

It's the 'everybody hates me, therefore everyone is a sad hater filled with hatred' argument.

metafex• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

mrottenkolber4• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

tinco• 12 years ago

Your whole comment is irrelevant, worse, detrimental even to the discussion. The discussion is about the violence. I think your stance on this is disgusting. You suggest that if it would deter the guy from building his software you would participate in his torment? That's weak, perhaps the foundation of this situation is that some of these open source communities attract people with especially weak personalities.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

there is really no point in flaming the dude. Instead I suggest to use all this energy to discredit/control/QA his work on a scientific level.

Their stance is that Poettering shouldn't be attacked on a personal level, only on a technical level. If that is a irrelevant, detrimental, disgusting manifestation of a weak personality to you, I suggest that you loosen your grip on your pearls.

mrottenkolber4• 12 years ago

I think your stance on this is disgusting. You suggest that if it would deter the guy from building his software you would participate in his torment?

That's really not what I intended to express. Like I said I strongly oppose any violence. And that's why I suggested to stop flaming and use the energy for scientific criticism.

imanaccount2472• 12 years ago

The discussion is about the violence

No, he is trying to move the discussion to being about his supposed victimhood because he doesn't like dealing with the real discussion. You are pretending that the person you replied to is tormenting Lennart. That is unacceptable and pathetic. This has become a constant problem now where people do something bad, get criticized, and then characterize the people criticizing them as abusive. The 99.99% of people criticizing him are not a problem because of the 0.01% who send him "dur I kil u!1" emails. This insistence on painting the entire group as being all the 0.01% is absurd.

danford• 12 years ago

Did you ever think that maybe the majority of the Linux community knows better than you?

asiekierka• 12 years ago

You must not forget that many distros moved to systemd out of necessity rather than desire, and for some (Debian) the decision was lengthy, splitting and controversial.

EDIT: By "necessity", I mean things such as GNOME (which is a very often used graphical shell in a majority of distributions) and udev (which is getting integrated into systemd, is used by most distros, and, bar Busybox's mdev or Gentoo's eudev fork, has no alternative) depending or planning to depend on systemd.

antocv3• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

How fucking hard is that?

ginko2• 12 years ago

What mrottenkolber, is stopping you from being an ambitious guy who writes non-shitty-software?
Write better tools, and software than Poettering, and leave him alone to write his.

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

im3w1l• 12 years ago

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

Yeah. And he should also personally fix global warming and create world peace. Otherwise he has like, no right to complain.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

If you don't like systemd, you should leave Linux? That's as silly as saying that if you don't like the new military dictator after the coup, you should get out of the country. It's definitely pragmatic advice (as is 'give me your wallet, or I'll shoot'), but it's morally empty. They're not just creating a different (overcomplicated, impenetrable, still unfinished) way of doing things, they're plowing the old way under.

People have lives and businesses that have depended on Linux for decades. They can't just get out, and they don't want to get out. Instead, how about they push the same 10 or so decisionmakers to take their side as the systemd supporters pushed to get into every distro with no alternative? Why is it somehow a terrible act to express your opinion if it is against systemd?

edit: and with the abuse that the uselessd guy is taking (steady flames and DDOS), it looks that creating an alternative is a position also hated by systemd supporters.

mrottenkolber4• 12 years ago

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

That's actually the essence of my online persona: I try to write good software. Not so ambitious though, I am too green to suggest the community should use my software.

You have a problem with Poetterings software? Do not use that software. How fucking hard is that?

I really didn't want to step on anyone's toe here. I thought I made it clear that I oppose the violence. Sorry you feel like taking this on the personal level (irony?).

As to "how [..] hard is that?". I don't know, but as others have pointed out, and from what I hear, the guys working on Slackware have to put in some effort to maintain a distribution without systemd.

Thesaurus2• 12 years ago

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

dalke5• 12 years ago

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

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

Thesaurus2• 12 years ago

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

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

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

Wilya• 12 years ago

Oh, come on.

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

1ris• 12 years ago

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

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

IshKebab• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

makomk2• 12 years ago

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

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

How are Bash, ifconfig and alsactl irrelevant? I know the second is deprecated, but obtaining debug information on network interfaces isn't something that has went away from a typical Linux distro workflow, and Bash is still the default shell on almost every distro.

Also, you won't believe how many times an "alsactl restore" has ended up fixing my audio, even on systems with PulseAudio.

adekok• 12 years ago

Maybe you are the problem. I don't know a single OSS developer that is more hated than you.

Lennart's complaints about Linus are on point here. But not for the reason Lennart thinks.

Linus has scathing personal insults. And people don't hate him. Because most of the time... he's right. Linus has gotten where he is through brains, a lot of work, and a certain amount of luck. His code has been adopted through sheer technical merit.

Lennart has written a lot of code, but the perception is that much of it was adopted for political reasons. This adoption goes directly against the core principles of the Open Source movement.

i.e. people feel emotionally betrayed.

In contrast, Linus telling them to go fuck themselves is just strong wording around a technical discussion. It doesn't hit emotional buttons in the same way.

The "feature creep" of systemd is another case in point. Systemd is increasing it's functionality, and forcing people to use it. Because the alternatives are no longer supported, or their favorite software is now welded to systemd. This process hits more emotional buttons.

The perception is that Open Source is about freedom, personal choice, etc. When people have choices removed in Open Source software, it hits emotional buttons. When they get told "my way or the highway", they get deeply offended on a personal level.

Lennart may be right in all of his technical decisions. But the environment he's in means he's guaranteed to get a lot of flak for it.

srcmap• 12 years ago

Agree!

After reading this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd , I dislike systemd also. The conspiracy side of my mind think redhead is pushing for systemd because systemd's complexity enable redhead to sale more support contracts.

rdsubhas• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

sqrt173• 12 years ago

IMO, you misunderstand some of it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

inclemnet• 12 years ago

the problem in question had been solved a couple times over

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

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

roghummal• 12 years ago

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

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

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

Speaks for itself.

jpswade3• 12 years ago

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversi...

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

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry-pi/...

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

What a strange situation.

hyperpape2• 12 years ago

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

jpswade3• 12 years ago

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

olgeni• 12 years ago

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

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

tux3• 12 years ago

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

...

notacoward2• 12 years ago

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

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

monochr4• 12 years ago

And Mr. Poettering should know all about being an obnoxious asshole: http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s

pantalaimon2• 12 years ago

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

nisa• 12 years ago

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

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

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

monochr4• 12 years ago

Because no one knows what they are talking about. There is a difference between a bug that's inside a program and a bug that's caused by the unexpected interaction of half a dozen programs. The only people who will see the later are those who actually use programs in the wild, e.g. system admins and not developers.

Which is exactly his point. "Have you submitted a patch" followed by "it's not our bug" doesn't help, it's down right idiotic when it comes to emergent bugs. Everyone involved can honestly say "not my problem" while you're stuck with a dead system "because you have the disabled".

Mr.Poettering et al seem not to realize that bugs don't just come from within programs but from how programs interact with their environment. When you hide all the details behind a single monolithic process it is either "this works" or "this doesn't" and there's nothing you can do about it. When it's a shell script trying together 20 programs it's "this kind mostly works apart from when x happens, which I can have a check for".

theflubba2• 12 years ago

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

sudowhodoido• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argh. I even hated writing this.

pdkl95• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

elementai• 12 years ago

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

mickrussom3• 12 years ago

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

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

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

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

Lennart Poettering on the state of open source communities

Related Stories