Lennart Poettering's Linus Torvalds rant

That just settles it,... Len Poettering is just (continuing to be) a Prima Donna baby,... While Torvalds is not one for political correctness, one has to realize that he makes his statements to provoke emotion and to stir action... not to make threats or be abusive in a personal attacking sort of way.

And Len Poettering has continually subjected the OSS community to his "my way or the highway" coding style,... Pulse Audio, and now SystemD... Good in initial concept,... then sprawling, all-consuming and taking over the farm with little concern for the impact on existing projects,... What does he expect?!?!

He may have some programming talent, but he's not some sort of god. And, he's got a poor attitude when people don't see things his way. He's part of the problem with a large segment of the developer community these days.

If his skin is as thick as he states, then why did he block the comments?

It may be true that Torvalds has a tendency to use more "bad language" than Poettering does, but I'd argue that, when one considers substance rather than form, Poettering is actually much more disrespectful to others than Torvalds is.

> If his skin is as thick as he states, then why did he block the comments?

He must consider himself another one of those self-appointed "thought leaders".

You are merely to read his thoughts and adapt them, not question them.

Bernard, I couldn't agree more. Reminds me of Patton, "When I want them to remember it, I give it to them straight, and I give it to them dirty. Then it sticks."

Or something close to that. Been a while since I saw the movie.

I find myself thinking of a prison warden that compared working in a mens prison and a womens prison.

In the mens prison, if there was a problem there would be fisticuffs and then it was settled.

In the womens prison, the issue would go on for weeks with jockeying for social positions and badmouthing.

Poettering-Kruger syndrome: a cognitive bias in which unskilled developers suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.

@kiki

That gave me a good giggle :)

The problem is that Poettering seems to have some strong backing in Redhat (given that both Pulseaudio and Systemd have been adopted by Fedora and RHEL) and that where Redhat goes most other distros follow it...

This realisation has me quite concerned about the Linux distro ecosystem, it really seems that Redhat has too much power over the direction of Linux distros and a single developer working for Redhat can therefore disrupt the whole Linux ecosystem.

What is wrong with all the other distro leaders?

Why are they all not seeing what we (just like loads of other users) are seeing?

Are they all secretly dreaming of a job with Redhat and therefore don't want to antagonise it?

I mean why else are all those other distro leaders adopting this crap in their distros too?

Is Slackware (Patrick Volkerding) really the only one with good judgement?

@linux4567

I to am concerned about the Linux ecosystem, I have been using Linux on/off since 1994 started with Slackware and fulltime since 1996 and couple of months ago I seriously thought about dumping the whole thing due to having to put PA back on one of my systems and all the hassles it caused me. This just should not be happening with an OS that is as mature as Linux.

What I find surprising is that Adam Williamson (a Redhat employee just like Poettering and the Fedora community guy, basically a PR job) is very busy defending Poettering in the comments section of this ZDNet article (look for comments from AdamWill).

To me this looks like Poettering has the backing of Redhat for his rant which would mean Redhat is attacking Linus...

Has the billion dollar turnover risen to the heads of Redhat's management to the point they now think they own Linux?

Something is seriously going wrong here...

I admit I'm secretly expecting Linus' public answer to Lennart's silly rant. Something in the line of a suggestion to go practice fellatio with Taliban carpet salesmen's dogs. (Grabs huge bag of popcorn).

@linux4567

makes one wonder why the RH CTO recently quit...

From the article wrote:"under Torvalds' sometimes rude direction, Linux has become perhaps the most important operating system in the world today"

Haha!

Seriously though, Linus is the leader of one component of the operating system, those who find his behavior rude can simply work on something else, work on some other part of the operating system. I know people like to romanticize the kernel and elevate it to a level of importance far beyond how important it actually is, but there are many, many, more projects people can work on and contribute to than the kernel.

Maybe contribute to the filesystem libraries, grub, bash or glibc if you like lower level, or maybe GNOME/GTK/KDE/QT if you like graphical work, or maybe even do your kernel work as an independent kernel module and not interact with Torvalds.

There are thousands of projects that aren't under Linus' control, some have nice leaders, some don't, most are just as important and need contributors just as much if not more than Linux.

If I had the skills, the place I would really focus is the libraries. Those things called by everything else.

Make a contribution there, and everyone benefits.

Poettering's right. They can cling to the meritocracy delusion, but the real requirement to be accepted in kernel development is to have rhino hide, or be a business with lots of money to fling into the pot.

I dont think anyone working on the kernel are delusional, i'm damn sure they know what what they are letting themselves in for I mean its not as if Linus hides his nature, I for one support his no-nonsense behaviour not surprising really as I come from an industry (OIl) where this sort of no-nonsense approach is appreciated and if you can't take some offensive language then don't ever think about taking a job in the Scottish Oil Industry.

This is called the reality of the real world and if Poettering doesn't like it he can either create a large enough movement of like minded kernel development folk and try to change it (good luck with that BTW) as his own personality failings are also well known or go do something else.

So basically if you can't take the way its run go do something else like fix Pulseaudio so that it actually might get close to working on a machine with only 2 cores and stop whining.

To generalize tc's comment: The bar is set unreasonably high, so that only an unreasonable person/party can jump over it. Because, as Shaw pointed out, true progress depends on unreasonable people.

AwesomeTux: I agree. If you do not like working on the kernel then find another part you do and contribute there. And the kernel is not the most important part of the OS..it is very important, but not the most important.

What this all says is nothing more than the simple truth that "If everyone liked everyone, then no one would have any friends.." because you don't have to like Linus but if you want to work on the kernel you get to deal with him. Its as simple as that.

> the kernel is not the most important part of the OS..it is very important, but not the most important

Well said.

I'd add that the kernel is the most critical to get right, especially in a monolithic kernel like Linux..A programming error in user-space won't bring the system to a halt, barring something that prevent init from launching. In the kernel, a panic is always a risk.

Gus3, there is also the risk of init going belly up...

Yawn. Same old defenses of asshattery. Setting a high bar for technical excellence is not achieved with personal attacks and abuse. Two different things, and the latter is just plain old bullying.

@tuxchick. One of our great philosophers (Lessing) once said something that can be translated like this: "If you don't lose your head in some situations, then you don't have a head in the first place." I've read most of Lennart Poettering's publications, I've watched his conferences and interviews online. As far as I can tell, he talks much and rarely listens. At the same time, he manages to piss off whole communities in the turn of a single sentence. Just search the FreeBSD forums for "poettering" to get a rough idea of the anger building up after he dismissed FreeBSD as "irrelevant" (sic). Other communities (Slackware and Gentoo) have equally had their share of snide remarks, and Linus himself has publicly stated that the systemd developers don't care much about bug reports. Curiously enough, I don't care so much about the technical aspects of systemd, and I'm certainly not a lamer to RTFM and learn new things. Open Source development is teamwork, and Lennart Poettering is manifestly not a good team player. Which explains all the anger and frustration around his project.

Yes, 750, I did say that.

kikinovak, "everyone does it" is a lame excuse. I laugh every time I see one of those "Come learn how to be a kernel contributor! We're really not that scary!" announcements. Maintaining a hostile atmosphere is great for perpetuating the status quo. Linux is lacking in key areas because of the cozy little clubhouse mentality, such as accessibility and a good strong open mobile stack. A lack of diversity = stagnation.

Tuxchick, I don't think kikinovak was saying "everybody does it". I think kikinovak was saying "actions speak louder than words" -- and that by that measure, Poettering is much worse than Torvalds.

This is becoming tedious. You want systemd? Fine by me. Jes somebody, somewhere, leave me a choice. Please. Thank you.

@notbob: systemd devs are working hard at making systemd an essential dependency so that there is no way you can avoid it without losing other major components of your system.

Pulseaudio is the same, bluetooth audio depends on it (and now Skype too).

And this attitude is exactly one of the main reasons why systemd pisses me off, this is completely against the Linux way of playing nice with other components and leaving the choice to the user.

Abstract of my previous post: 1. LP talks much but rarely listens. 2. LP doesn't care if his snide remarks piss off whole communities of users and/or developers. 3. At last LP's given a well-deserved lesson in human interaction.

And now he posted a G+ entry with the title systemd-office (apparently he submitted a liberoffice patch that translated some german code comments into english).

If you don't want to get mauled, why do you keep poking the bear?!

> If you don't want to get mauled, why do you keep poking the bear?!

Some children never learn the difference between positive and negative "attention".