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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
He can complain all he wants, but when people go around calling Poettering names, wishing him death, that shit has to stop. Thats not complaining. Thats not whats happening here with systemd.
He can complain about global warming all he wants, but if he sends a mail-bomb or threatens any ExxonMobile higher up manager, or bombs an oil-rig, that shit will not be tolerated. Altough you may argue otherwise.
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.
Also, before anyone points to previous messages saying that udev will continue to be usable without systemd, they're out of date. Lennart Poettering currently intends to make systemd a requirement to use udev and expects applications to use the new systemd-only way of calling into udev directly, so that distros can't even fork udev or use an older version to get around the issue. See http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTczNjI
And he even knows it : "I guess in a way with the energy we are pushing the changes we propose with we are calling for opposition"
On one hand, personal and death threats are way out of line. On the other hand, he kinda rip what he sow. He could have done the same post without mentioning Linus and Gentoo for instance. When you put so much "energy" to push for a key component, don't be surprise by the push back. Especially if you're not willing to compromise. Yes, it can get out of hand, but that doesn't mean the push back has no ground.
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.