"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this" - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13rdjryqyn1xlt3522sxpugoz3gujbhh04 <comment><USER3> I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people, especially those you don't agree with.

I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would "shame" me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge. Additionally, the founder of Perl Mongers, Brian D Foy, argued with me about the naming of my application framework, and then refused to approve the naming of my module even after other people on the newsgroup discussed it with me and we came to a good resolution. ( which led to the vanishing of "registered" modules on cpan imo )

The open source community, at large, is not a happy helpful place, and I have gone through a lot of harassment just contributing my own free open source stuff to the world. Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face.

I am referencing names of individuals so that people can lookup these events and see the truth in what I'm saying; NOT to shame these people. They are all good developers, and I value their contributions ( don't necessarily like these people but what does that matter ). There should be respect in the community regardless of whether you like or dislike people's projects.

<comment><USER4> The internet in general has problems with this, but I suspect it's much worse in the open source world where unmoderated forums are standard. If you look at the moderation tools available in something like mailman, they're very poor. It's just not been a priority for technical discussion forums at all. And the social convention is to leave forums largely unmoderated anyway, so it's easy to get into a downward spiral where behaviour gets more and more extreme as people try to make their opinions stand out amongst the crowd.

What's worse, the fact that this scares off contributors is hard to spot, because you by definition cannot easily measure contributions that would have happened but didn't because of a community problem.

If you look at non-technical forums like Facebook, newspaper comment sections etc there's usually some form of moderation that imposes house rules like "be civil". This sort of thing can clean up individual forums but the wider problem remains: some people are just nasty and they often believe they can influence the development of their favourite project by being sufficiently nasty to developers they disagree with. If they can't do that in the project's own forums they'll do it elsewhere.

The Bitcoin community has pretty severe problems with this too, it's not just a Linux thing.

<comment><USER5> You cannot moderate mailing lists because they are not centralized. When you hit "reply all" in a mailing list, the replies go directly to everyone who is on the To: or Cc: list. The list robot is just one of those parties. And of course, private replies are possible that the list robot doesn't even see.

Some lists try to fix this by abusing Reply-to: to try to steer discussion replies to the list address, but that is fundamentally broken.

About all you can do in a mailing list is to cull the junk from the permanent web archive.

[Edit: look, you can downvote all you like. I know how mailing lists work and stand by what I wrote. I have used mailing lists for almost a quarter century, and I run mailing lists of my own. I know the ins and outs, and ways they can be configured.]

<comment><USER6> That's not what a mailing list is. What you are describing is an email message with multiple recipients, not a mailing list. Mailing lists don't include the email addresses of all of the recipients in the distributed messages To or CC fields, and the From and Reply-to is the address of the mailing list, never a list of all users on the mailing list.

Mailing lists are centrally managed, and have a "reflector" or central distribution point (what you call a "robot") which maintains the email addresses of all the people on the mailing list. In order to add or remove yourself to the mailing list, you typically have to send a message to name-of- mailing-list-REQUEST, not to the whole mailing list of course. Now days there are usually web pages that people can use to subscribe and unsubscribe and view the archives, and which the administrator can use to moderate messages, but in the old days the moderator was a human and administered the list via email. To save bandwidth (in the days that it mattered, i.e. over the slow ARPANET and over international connections and expensive dial up modems) there would be redistribution lists for regions and organizations, which users or local administrators would have to manage themselves (or the central administrator would have to forward requests to the redistribution list administrator), so only one copy of the message had to be sent to each redistribution list.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list)

An electronic mailing list or email list is a special use of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list — a list of names and addresses — as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to its members or customers, but typically refers to four things:

1) a list of email addresses,

2) the people ("subscribers") receiving mail at those addresses,

3) the publications (email messages) sent to those addresses, and

4) a reflector, which is a single email address that, when designated as the recipient of a message, will send a copy of that message to all of the subscribers.

<comment><USER5> What you're describing is a particular mailing list configuration (one often seen today); not what mailing lists _are_.

Traditional mailing lists (such as ones created by a vanilla install of GNU Mailman) do not work they way you describe.

They work like this:

1\. You send a message to a mailing list address. This address belongs to a software agent which sends the message to everyone. Your From: header is clearly preserved. The mailing list robot adds itself to the Cc: line to stay in the loop.

2\. Someone who wants to continue your discussion publicly hits Reply All. At this point, the mail software composes a a new message which To: you, From: this person, and Cc: to the mailing list.

3\. You receive the message directly. The robot also receives it because it is in the Cc: loop, and sends it to the subscribers. (If you're also one of the subscrbers, and the list is configured that way, it will avoid sending you a "list copy").

4\. And so it goes.

But what do I know; I have only used mailing lists for 25 years, and run mailing lists of my own on my own server.

<comment><USER7> What you describe certainly used to be common, but it's not anymore. You didn't say why the old style is better.

I find it frustrating for a mailing list because invariably a long thread is going to have missing messages. In the context of a mailing list the default behavior should be to reply to the list and setting the Reply-To takes care of that nicely.

Btw, the "because I've been doing it for n years" argument gets less effective as n increases. Ok, it's probably a bell curve but it peaks long before 25.

<comment><USER5> Reply-To does not take care of anything nicely. There is no "default" behavior about how to reply; you have to think about whether to reply privately or publicly based on the topic and your intended content. (If anything, the default should probably be privately, unless the response really is of interest to the whole multitude of subscribers. All too often, mailing list discussions devolve to the point that it's not the case.)

Reply-To: stomps over the option of replying privately. It can still be done, with manual steps. Worse, someone might not be paying attention, and just use Reply out of habit, thinking it's a private reply, when in fact it is being broadcast to the list. It's very sneaky!

The old style is better because it is more convenient and non-broken. It keeps conversations intact by letting people have a debate with the mailing list without subscribing to it, and doesn't rudely re-program your Reply button into doing Reply All.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, this was discussed about an hour ago, and it hit the flame filter pretty fast. I'd suggest that it won't last very long on the front page.

Incidentally, I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN. What has happened to Lennart, and the behaviour of Linus Torvalds as a bully, is probably something decent to talk about.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859)

<comment><USER9> You need to understand one thing: you are wrong.

Linus Torvalds is not a bully. He's in charge of one of the biggest and most successful project out there. And this project is open-source, and anyone can contribute to it. Anyone. Even your cat. Imagine the Windows codebase being opened to anyone, with anyone being able to suggest fixes and send patches, or ask questions, or make suggestions.

You do not want any idiot to commit insane things. You need to have some barriers. And these barriers are related to technical skills.

You have to understand that the alternative to "Linus is mean" is "Linus let a fucking patch enter the kernel, and it broke millions of machines around the world, causing millions of dollars worth of damage". Every single line committed in the kernel must be carefully checked, and if you lack the skills, just go away, because it will (1) spoil the precious kernel maintainers time and more importantly (2) do damages to millions of users.

So I am personally very glad Linus is "abrasive", because when someone screw up, he makes it perfectly clear, and this is totally appropriate considering how critical the linux kernel is nowadays.

And yes, if you want to live in a politically correct, nice, cheerful project, this is not the project you need to work for.

[Having said that, I do not think Linus has ever been dishonest (such as refusing a patch only because he did not like its author, unlike some C-library guy), which is precisely the reason why his abrasiveness is perfectly fine to me]

<comment><USER4> You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to operate with reasonable team dynamics? There is no correlation between "runs an important project" and "must be an asshole" even though certainly everyone has off days from time to time (I've been known to flame people when reaching the end of my tether but usually regretted it later).

I think this notion - which Linus pushes - that the alternative to yelling at people and generally being short tempered is always "political correctness" ... well it's quite harmful. Yes, it _CAN_ get that way, if people interpret criticism of their work as personal criticism and try to shut it down by complaining about it. I've seen that happen before. Some people don't know how to handle someone implying, even if politely, that their work sucks and can't handle it. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way and well functioning teams manage to avoid it.

<comment><USER10> _You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to operate with reasonable team dynamics?_

I wonder about those projects sometime. If we took all of the conversations that ever took place at their office and stuck them online and in public. What would that be like? How many journalists and bloggers would find inflammatory quotes that can be published out of context to shame the person who spoke those words? How would Linus stack up next to John Doe of the Foo project?

Or, think about everything you read, said, wrote or heard at work over the last month. Now imagine hand wringing blogposts about all of it. Especially the things that you want to exclude from this thought experiment because they would have never been said if your only communication method was a public mailing list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll probably get burned for saying this but I think this is related to GamerGate/SocialJusticeWarriors. I think that other controversy is being portrayed as anti-feminist (and there is a lot of undertones of that) but I think that it is more indicative of a general problem -- it is basically unrestrained incivility against those whom one has disagreements, or who has done perceived wrongs.

For some reason it has become really easy to escalate things quickly from what are disagreements or perceived wrongs to really intense hatred and online forms of retaliation that is so extreme that it overshadows the original disagreements/wrongs.

It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments, the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with.

This type of crazy retaliation is really harmful to those that are targeted, but it also serves to detract from legitimate arguments. It is just weird.

But this is the internet and I suspect it isn't really that easy to curb going full "4chan" on subjects because it can be "fun" for those involved because there are few personal consequences -- as per that sociology concept of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation).

<comment><USER12> >It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments, the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with.

Except the anonymity involved means people on the other side send abuse to themselves and their side in order to shift discussion off of the topic and onto how their opponents are evil abusive monsters. And then of course people who just love stirring up shit send abuse to both sides purely because they enjoy it.

<comment><USER11> I think the anonymity is the core problem-- anonymous crowds are easy to undermine ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur)) and they are always the least self-controlled. But the larger, amorphous and distributed the anonymous group, the more easy it is to undermine them via real Agent provocateurs and also people who are in it just for the kicks of causing havoc.

<comment><USER13> > I think the anonymity is the core problem

This explains the high level of rational discourse on news websites and Facebook :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I must be very lucky... because after many many years of writing open source, being involved with at least three communities (IT security with hping, Tcl language with Tcl/Jim-Interpreter, Databases with Redis) I still have to receive serious attacks. Actually the only attacks I can remember are about my vision on how diversity should be handled (I was accused of sexism for saying that people are all alike), and a few company-driven attacks 99% generated from the SF area and for people working for competing companies, and with a big overlap of people accusing me of sexism (go figure...). Basically none of this was ever a great deal, and the remaining 99.999% of the OSS community was always awesome. Basically I'm just a single data point but as somebody involved for a long time in OSS, I can't confirm what I read.

Well, also consider this: I refuse most pull requests, and I'm not the kind of guy that is kind at every cost. I also am part of a minority, being _very_ southern-european, from Sicily, often associated with the worst cliché of the Italian culture, Mafia, ... I also have a vision on software development which is very far from what is considered "good practice". One could expect me to receive more attacks than average.

<comment><USER15> Could you hint or point us toward some of the ways your vision on software development is far from what is considered good practice? I like to absorb counter-normal opinions.

<comment><USER14> Just a few examples: reinvent the wheel (Redis uses its own event loop, strings library, and in general has very little external deps). Always backporting new features when they have little interactions with the rest on the code base, to patch-level releases of the stable version. Using data structures or algorithms which are not common. For example Redis implements LRU by random sampling. Taking extreme tradeoffs: Redis is also a store but the dataset is in RAM, Redis Cluster does not try to achieve theoretical optimum of CP or AP in order to win latency, lack of metadata, simplicity, and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lennart specifically called out Gentoo; as a Gentoo user, I do want to speak up in defense of the Gentoo community.

I will concede the point that Lennart has, by far, probably received more vitriol per-capita from the Gentoo community than any others. I'm not going to defend any of the personal attacks launched on him.

However, Lennart writes very opinionated software, and the opinions it takes are more at clash with the Gentoo way than the Fedora way or the Ubuntu way. Furthermore it seems to me that Gentoo users are more conservative than any distro other than Slack.

What this adds up to is that a far larger fraction of the Gentoo community have issues with Lennart's software. There will be some fraction X of people who have issues with his software that will make inappropriate attacks on Lennart himself. Given that a much larger fraction of the Gentoo community has issues with his software than in other communities, the fact he gets a disproportionate amount of vitriol from Gentoo users doesn't necessarily mean that X is larger in Gentoo.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. About ten years ago, there was a saying on Gentoo site saying that it is a bug if you can't customize your gentoo system the way you want it.

Personal attacks are not OK, but he should keep his opinion on what _my_ machine should do for himself. For what it is worth, his systemd is a bug.

<comment><USER18> > but he should keep his opinion on what _my_ machine should do for himself

Releasing free software and what you accuse him of are entirely different things. Frankly I'd like to understand how you even equate someone releasing software which you aren't even forced to use, to essentially ramming his opinions of how YOUR machine should run down your throat.

The anti-systemd people really aren't coming across at all well in this thread. At lot of what you guys are accusing him of literally makes no sense on the most basic level. This being a prime example.

Don't like systemd? Don't install systemd. Don't like that a distro is bundling systemd? Don't use the distro that is bundling systemd.

The creator of systemd cannot be held responsible for you voluntarily installing the software, leaving it on your system, and then becoming upset about how it works. If you installed systemd and hate it, remove it. It aint' rocket science.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Unfortunately, things aren't as simple as you'd like them to be.

The systemd developers have made many political decisions that ended up putting systemd in a position that makes it difficult to avoid. The prime move often cited is the engulfment of udev inside the systemd codebase and entangling it with systemd's shared files (formerly belonging to libsystemd- shared, not it's just a big libsystemd blob), and later rewriting the build system so that it was harder (though not impossible) to make udev-only builds. This and many other decisions prompted the creation of eudev. Of course, now they're converting the transport layer from Netlink to sd-bus, thus intending on making udev _systemd-only_ , and taunting Gentoo users along the way.

Furthermore, various distribution maintainers (though particularly Debian and Arch) are placing various components that _optionally_ use systemd libraries, or provide systemd units, as being _dependent_ on systemd. You can see this with Arch and lighttpd.

Further, GNOME's adoption of systemd libraries was negotiated by Lennart as far back as 2011. Though it would have likely occurred anyway, he was an active instigator in the ordeal ([https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop- devel-list/2011-May/...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2011-May/msg00427.html)), and a couple of years later was arguing on his G+ feed that with systemd-logind being unportable and inseparable, that this should be a reason for Debian to adopt it. He chose to do this rather than continue ConsoleKit or make logind an independent daemon. Currently, more is being consolidated: Avahi is now becoming systemd-resolved, and kmscon is becoming systemd-consoled. Among other examples.

But it's not just the GNOME Shell, some core Desktop Linux applications now depend on systemd libraries, as well. upower and udisks2 come to mind. The former even caused quite a stir in Gentoo circles when a regular upower update was suddenly pulling in the entire systemd stack.

The whole point of systemd is to be _the_ standard userspace middleware for a GNU/Linux system, and to be an absolute essential.

No, Lennart is not a rampaging monster, but to say that he's just some innocent bloke who's simply releasing free software, is bullshit.

<comment><USER4> But again, nobody is _forcing_ you to use systemd. You are upset because you want to upgrade some part of your OS but not have systemd, even though the developers of the part you want to upgrade decided to use it. But you could just .... not upgrade. You could use Debian Stable, or fork the programs that are using systemd to take it out.

It's been years since I used desktop Linux, but frankly so far my impression of systemd is that it sounds like someone in the Linux community is finally doing some damned architecture work for once instead of just trying to build a desktop on top of a pile of historical accidents. I remember when GNOME 2 was being developed (back then I _was_ a user) and the massive, rampaging flamewars about how GNOME 2 was killing Linux, how it was fundamentally against the UNIX way etc. Back then it was Havoc Pennington who got shitted on by the "community" for daring to suggest that maybe you don't really need seven kinds of clock widget installed by default. And now what I see is people forking GNOME because they love GNOME 2 so much and they don't want to switch to GNOME 3.

Back when I used to work on Linux related stuff, one of my projects was a cross-distro packaging framework. The idea was you could create binaries that'd install and be upgradeable on any reasonable distribution. We did a lot of work into binary compatibility and other tools so you could make binaries that soft-linked against libraries, etc. The amount of crap we got was unreal. A lot of people in high places in the community, especially from distributions, _hated_ the idea that maybe people could just download apps from a website and it'd work. I think at some level they understood that distros competed largely on the size of their package repositories and if that approach to software distribution became mainstream they'd lose their "lock in". And some of them had internalised the idea that "Linux is great. Linux doesn't distribute software in the same way as other platforms. Therefore that's what makes Linux great."

When I look at MacOS X what I see is a very successful OS that has an architecture rather similar to what systemd sounds like (the OS X equivalent is called Launch Services). So maybe that's why distros are getting behind it.

<comment><USER19> You are forced when you cannot use the software you used before.

<comment><USER20> Forced – does that mean they raided your servers and deleted the old source code or just that you want someone else to do new development following your whims but aren't willing to do it yourself?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So I'm a blogger with posts that occasionally go semi-viral [1], and I've been subject to unpleasant comments on a few occasions. Here are a couple of posts which have gotten me quite a bit of hate:

[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html)

[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html)

In both cases they are posts about mathematics which use other topics (economics, dating) as concrete examples and the examples draw hatred.

However, unlike many of the people subject to unpleasant behavior such as this, I'm going to suggest that the best thing to do is ignore it and move on with your life. I don't favor much in the way of systematic solutions. Assorted "codes of conduct" being proposed are blunt instruments and are easily used by people in power to bully others or to shut down discussion of "incorrect" opinions.

Furthermore, technology is fairly unique in it's communication. In many fields, communication is there to create a sense of community and in-group status - creating a tribe. In our field, most communication is simply about facts. It's quite easy to ignore "you're wrong because X,Y,Z _and a big jerk_ " \- just evaluate argument X,Y,Z and update your beliefs accordingly.

Back when I lived in NY, a coach told me (rough paraphrase): "Tu debil. Necesita para construir tu corpu." ("You're weak. You need to build your body.") In the recent past, the tech world's culture was a lot like that of a mexican boxing club. The correct response is "si, mi SQL debil, eu pratico." ("Yes, my SQL is weak, I'll practice.")

Somewhere along the line, we gave this up and became a culture where feelings matter more than results. I think the solution here is for the tech world to regrow the thick skin it once had.

[1] A post about functional programming is limited in it's eventual virality.

<comment><USER22> This is different for men and women.

[http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women- ar...](http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent- welcome-internet-72170/)

"Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7."

[http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment- online/](http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/)

The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It's defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their "place."

<comment><USER23> When the message is a threat of violence or hitmen, it should be taken serious regardless of the targeted person gender.

It is very important to not trivialize harassment directed at men because they are male and not female. That is part of the very gender stereotype that it is the cause of the statistics your referenced, and reinforcing that behavior will only make things worse.

<comment><USER24> No, that's stupid, because the cost of taking it seriously is far far greater than the estimated badness of any of those threats.

Reasoning like that is why we have the TSA.

<comment><USER25> You misunderstood; belorn meant " _it should be taken_ [equally] _serious regardless of the targeted person_ ['s] _gender_ ".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > in particular ones where losing face is a major issue

This touches an interesting point. Feedback must be accurate. If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are "not right". Losing face is a fact of life. When I'm wrong, I want to know I am wrong, what I am wrong about and just how wrong am I. If possible, tell me what can I do to be right the next time.

It must also be kind. You do not point someone is wrong to humiliate the person and you should take care not to (I try and I fail more often than I'd like to) fall into the trap of judging a person for his or her first efforts.

Having said that, I am almost sure all the exaggerated discourse on the Linux kernel mailing list is not really part of the message, but should be understood as more like a sport, a game, where the one with the most elaborately crafted insult wins. When Linus says you should be retroactively aborted he most likely wants to say you are very wrong and your idea is really bad and that, maybe, you should be more thorough the next time you submit a patch. Their time is a finite resource.

Is this the most efficient way to run the community? Probably not. We just don't know what is the most efficient way to do it and it can just be that Linus found a local maximum.

<comment><USER27> >If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are "not right".

Saying "you're wrong" isn't the issue here. Saying "your mom should have aborted you and i hope you die" is the issue. I don't think people in cultures where losing face is a big issue much care if they're told they're wrong. They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or be killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts of the world.

What you say in defense of the mailing list insults is the same thing that has been said about casual racism or casual misogyny in other groups normally dominated by white men. It scares away other groups and cultures, and it's not acceptable anywhere.

<comment><USER26> Maybe, just maybe, "your mom should have aborted you and i hope you die" is just an overly elaborated form of saying you are wrong and should not be taken literally.

> They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or > be killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts > of the world.

Nobody is wrong enough to warrant that. I see the "elaborate insult" thing can get out of hand, but, still, it should not be taken at face value. I believe the proper way to deal with this is to either engage in an escalation of extremely elaborate insults (provided you accompany that with technical argument defending your "bad" idea) signalling the insult is not the topic being discussed (but it's "adorning" the arguments) or stating, privately, that the insult crosses a line and asking the person to please not to that again. It _usually_ works.

Disclaimer: I am a caucasian straight married male in his mid-40's. I probably belong to the demographic least susceptible to bullying and some of the situations described here are probably very alien to me. I appreciate constructive feedback, however. I do not know how the moderators would react to an insult war, however, so I advise against it, even if you think it proves your point.

<comment><USER26> Hint: downvoting is not a good way to provide constructive criticism.

<comment><USER28> Another symptom of feelings-over-results: quick and effort-free attacks like downvoting take the place of elaboration and reasoned debate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Open source is not awful. It's perhaps the most important thing to happen to computing, ever. Multi-billion dollar companies have formed largely around open source. It enables millions of people to do business. Learning how to code is easier than ever.

Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day...

Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good. Well, a little more than that, but that's the basic gist.

I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS. The few times I've found a bug I sent a bug report, the maintainer was super friendly (maybe because I wasn't a whiny douche-bag complaining about something that I got for free), and fixed it in an absurdly short amount of time (less than a day). Even if it wasn't fixed for a month I'd have been more than happy.

Anyhow, the open source community is much like the world at large. Many very nice, friendly people, and a few assholes. Same thing if you step outside. It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your interactions, but rather as a sharing philosophy in the same way free markets are an economic philosophy.

<comment><USER30> > Open source is not awful.

He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways. You're doing nothing more than fighting a strawman.

> Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good

This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties), and I can't honestly believe you don't know that.

> I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS.

Another classic false argument that comes up all the time - do you think your good experiences cancel out his bad ones, or the other bad ones discussed elsewhere in this thread?

> It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your > interactions

More weird phrasing that seems a bit of a strawman. Who said that the open source community 'replaces' one's interactions? Can a community not have bad characteristics simply because it's not the only community you're involved in? This really makes no sense.

> but rather as a sharing philosophy

Again, this is an argument from nothing more than being pedantic. It's incredibly obvious that the original post isn't referring at all to the general philosophies of open source, but to the actual communities he participates in, in terms that are not remotely unusual. Even if you're adamant that open source as a term must only refer to the philosophy and none of the practical details, you've done nothing to affect the original argument, because it's still about the communities that exist around it in practice.

Overall, I think your post is a bit of a mess of bad arguments and classic fallacies.

<comment><USER29> > He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways.

But none of those ways have anything to do with open source. You need to look no further than #gamergate to see that people act like assholes on the internet.

> This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about > the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties), > and I can't honestly believe you don't know that.

I know that, but equating a concept with people is like equating the corner block outside with the drug dealer that sells there. "Street corners are awful!"

> t's incredibly obvious that the original post isn't referring at all to the > general philosophies of open source, but to the actual communities he > participates in, in terms that are not remotely unusual.

So instead of saying those communities suck, he says open source can be awful in some ways...

Communities can suck in any industry/hobby/interest/etc...

<comment><USER30> > But none of those ways have anything to do with open source

More bad arguments! He didn't say that open source is unique. Perhaps he's simply talking about the communities he's actually involved in.

> equating a concept with people

I don't think you do get it. Nothing about Lennart's terminology is particularly unusual - the 'open source community' in standard parlance is a fairly well defined set of people, organisations and forums that isn't particularly controversial to refer to.

I think you really are just using different words as everyone else to mean the same things.

<comment><USER29> > Perhaps he's simply talking about the communities he's actually involved in.

Then he should have said 'The communities I'm involved in are awful'. And I'd agree. I didn't realize he made PulseAudio and Systemd (or was involved in some way). I personally don't mind either project (neither have harmed my Linux experience, Pulse is convenient for my uses), and I think both get a lot of unwarranted criticism. Not least for the fact that, with open source, you don't _HAVE_ to be stuck with anything you don't want to be.

> I don't think you do get it. Nothing about Lennart's terminology is > particularly unusual - the 'open source community' in standard parlance is a > fairly well defined set of people, organisations and forums that isn't > particularly controversial to refer to. I think you really are just using > different words as everyone else to mean the same things.

See, this is the thing. I'm not part of that community. I could care less. But the reason why conversations like this aren't useful, is that you're equating a specific group of people with a concept, but criticizing the concept.

Posts like this find their way outside the community. They give fodder to those who would like to see all software be closed source. They aren't helpful.

Again, he should be far more explicit in what he's actually criticizing...

<comment><USER30> > Then he should have said 'The communities I'm involved in are awful

Luckily he doesn't need to, because (as above) he's obviously talking about the open source community.

> I could care less

You _couldn 't_ care less.

I really think none of your criticisms are a real problem, or that there's any real ambiguity. I won't keep replying, it doesn't seem useful.

<comment><USER29> > Luckily he doesn't need to, because (as above) he's obviously talking about > the open source community.

Which open-source community? The Linux kernel community is very different from say, the Haskell community (which is also very invested in open-source).

> You couldn't care less.

You accuse me of splitting hairs on semantics, yet you choose to correct me here. You understood what I meant, local slang here (for better or for worse) is to say what I wrote (even if it's not 100% gramatically correct), but you are more than willing to criticise me for not 'accepting' ambiguous language for something that should be 'obvious' to 'the open-source community'...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He's just the new Drepper.

Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole.

Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git is the more important contribution, because as it stands Linux as a potential platform for end user deployment, except as part of Android or Chrome OS, is basically dead now.

<comment><USER32> I'd be very interested if you could provide evidence of Lennart being an asshole. I've honestly never seen him be anything other than professional.

<comment><USER31> His entire m.o. is passive aggressive asshole, whereas Linus is balls out asshole, but has the relatively unique quality of being right more often than not.

I'd even argue this post is lennart using the genuinely disgusting antics of others as a way to deflect potential criticism of his work in future. This is why, like Drepper, many view him as a long term liability to the ecosystem as a whole.

<comment><USER33> That's odd... I thought passive-aggressive is when you're deliberately failing to do something you're supposed to do and capable of doing, but what he's usually accused of is actually doing too many things - please clarify this apparent contradiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I agree somewhat with Lennart. The Libre/OSS community is full of egotistical asshats -- generally western and in their 30s and 40s. What's funny, though, is that not all camps in the community are that bad. The Linux camp has deteriorated in recent years -- I've noticed it myself on several occasions. The BSD camps don't suffer near as much from the nonsense that occurs on the Linux side. I think there are several reasons for this. One I have notice in person working on both sides is that the BSD crews tend to be more professional overall. They love UNIX and the goal has always been to create the best UNIX-like OS around. The BSD license is arguably better IMO as well. Quite a few Linux devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and tend to be vocal closed-source opponents for the sake of being vocal. The world cannot be all closed source or all open source. There is room for everyone. Most of the issues with people I have had over the three decades I've been in IT have been with Linux-based devs and users. Without exception all BSD guys and girls have been the pinnacle of professionalism. I think this speaks volumes and is quite telling. This is not observation from one workplace -- this is over many, many years in different work spaces, different cultures, states, whatnot.

All things considered, I have been seriously thinking of moving my core infrastructure over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD to avoid the coming (well, here already) continued balkanisation of Linux. The code quality of Linux has deteriorated of late as well. I've noticed it. My BSD test boxes running the same software suffer nary a hitch. Debian seems to be sane still, as does Slackware, but for how long. This ridiculous systemd battle is bonkers.

<comment><USER35> Interesting viewpoint; I don't have the same perception, but communities are big, so you might be right. Do you mean purely the sysadmin community in workplaces, or also the developer community? For developer communities, the BSD world seems to have a pretty wide range of community friendliness, but I wouldn't describe it as uniformly pleasant and professional. Certainly the OpenBSD community is not that: there are many good things about de Raadt, but the tone he sets is more one of combative-and-right than pleasant-and- professional (and he's not the only one in the community with that tone). He's no less prone to flamage than Torvalds, anyway. The only _really_ friendly BSD developer community I've encountered is the NetBSD one, which seems to make an active effort at cultivating a certain ethos. FreeBSD is maybe somewhere in between, though I think trending friendlier compared to some years ago. Some sub-communities are also quite pleasant, like the ZFS one (which lives a bit more in Illumos-land, but has a lot of BSD contributors as well).

<comment><USER34> I'm talking devs and sysadmins. I agree with you that NetBSD is the friendliest of the bunch.

Theo de Raadt is a great guy. He gets a bad rap when it's undeserved. What the OBSD guys is very serious stuff. He gets a lot of flak but running an OS and security software project as successfully as he does takes a strong personality. He has that, and in the real, he's a nice, friendly guy. He simply has no tolerance for people with no merit and nothing to add. Anyone would be the same.

I've met a couple of snarky FreeBSD admins, but they were also Linux and Windows admins at the same time. These two guys were full of themselves regardless of platform.

BSD (in general) tends to be more polished than Linux and suffers fewer bugs out of the box. Again, this is what I've noticed. I've yet, in almost 20 years of using FreeBSD off and on, ever had an issue with it that was a deal breaker. I cannot say this of the various Linux distros.

<comment><USER36> I've never used BSD before, but from reading FreeBSD's BSD vs Linux [0], I can't see a major difference aside of the license, and the number of distributions available. Can you please explain what made you go on off using BSD/Linux?

[0]: [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining- bsd/compa...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining- bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html)

<comment><USER34> I have noticed over the last ten or so years that FreeBSD in particular is ridiculously stable -- far more so than any Linux distro I have tried, including Red Hat, CentOS, and Debian.

I have stable Linux machines running Debian and I have FreeBSD test machines running the same software. FreeBSD uses less resources (exact same HW), tends to be slightly faster, and is arguably easier to admin on a daily basis. Let's not even mention ZFS, which is remarkable in its own right. I'm impressed. I once ran an OpenBSD pf firewall that supported almost 200 users on some seruously underpowered HW. This thing's load average was always ridiculously low. Ditto FreeBSD now. What will cause the Debain machines to peak out sometimes, FreeBSD doesn't seem to notice. Interesting and a bit impressive.

<comment><USER35> I also like both FreeBSD and Debian (have no real experience with the others). But on _performance_ it varies a lot by workload. To take two examples: over the years at any given point in time, FreeBSD has had a better networking stack than Linux, but worse scalability to large numbers of cores. Though there is some ongoing sponsored work on the latter [1,2].

[1] [http://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/freebsd-foundation-and- ix...](http://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/freebsd-foundation-and-ixsystems- collaborate-to-further-the-cause-of-high-performance-computing-on-freebsd/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8123512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8123512)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> He calls Linus out for being a toxic element in the open source (or at least Linux) ecosystem. This is quite probably true.

Trying to look at it from the other side, though, I wonder if Linus got to be the way he is because it's how he copes with the toxic effluvia he has to deal with on a regular basis. Surely Torvalds has to deal with even more of this than Poettering does. If these things were directed at me on a regular basis, I can't claim with confidence that my moral fortitude would be up to the task of remaining easy to work with either.

<comment><USER38> You know for being a toxic element, Linus's has done a hell of a job with Linux. Is there anything else that's even come close to it in terms of technical or business success? I don't think so.

<comment><USER37> Yes, while I think he is culturally and emotionally toxic, he is also brilliant, and has led Linux to great success. I respect his achievements and his technical abilities. Do you think this excuses his behavior?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> For all its flaws I must credit the various open source codes I've come to study along the years for all I know in CS. Long term, it's more important than degrees and schools.

For instance I vividly remember how hard for me it was to learn and code in Objective-C for iOS back in 2009, at this time there was only few related open source projects available to study and learn how good UI were implemented and such, it was mostly a closed source world.

Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled Rust developpers so far. I can't fathom how painful it must be for current Swift developers to develop in a young (so far) closed project where you can't see nothing and bang your head against every walls to find your way.

<comment><USER40> > Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is > open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in > Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most > skilled Rust developpers so far.

Last I saw, reading the compiler wasn't recommended (by someone) since the code is apparently old and not idiomatic.

<comment><USER41> Historically, that's been kind of true, but it depends on the part, really, and is getting better all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This doesn't pertain to " _Open Source_ " in general, the same argument can be said about companies and closed-source products, which can be just as well run by jerks. I have a couple of small projects published on GitHub and the people that interacted with me have been very professional and thankful for my work. I am also a part of big open-source communities which are very professional and asshole behavior is definitely an exception and is being punished in general.

A comment like " _How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?_ " is only tolerated if you're Linus Torvalds or somebody like him that has contributed a lot and that is tolerated in spite of his character. And yes, the world is full of jerks that want to copy Linus Torvalds, or Theo de Raadt, or Richard Stallman, or Steve Jobs, or David Heinemeier Hansson, or whatever else ruthless leader with strong opinions that happened in this industry, but without the track record to back up their strong thoughts. Open Source is only special because the discussions are often public for anybody to see.

I do find Linus' behavior regrettable, as he's a very public person in this industry, his opinions do have legs and he is a role model for others. And I'm personally against PC talk, for example I think usage of the word "fuck" is totally legitimate because it implies passion, it implies that you care, but I think critiques should never be ad-hominem and people breaking this rule should get social punishment, including Linus.

<comment><USER43> I think if you're involved in a closed-source company and you act like an ass too many times you'll get fired.

<comment><USER44> The difference is that in a corporate setting, if you're fired that's the end of it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, in an open source setting, if you act like an asshat you can still contribute and discuss and continue to be an asshat. And then other people ignore you. So you convince people that they're the asshat. And people believe you because you're still there.

I'm not sure it's really a flaw. It's just the way it is. I feel as if it's simply one of the tradeoffs that you make with an open source project. People can hang around and be annoying and abusive and there isn't all that much you can do to totally get rid of them if they're determined. On the other hand, you can get brilliant programmers who come out of nowhere and have no qualifications that would never get past the interview stage in a large company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's easy to see that in some quarters this is certainly true. People are allowed —even encouraged— to smack people down if they're being ridiculous... But this isn't the rule.

[http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about- ubuntu/conduct](http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct)

As an Ubuntu member, I'm expected to behave. In our derivative communities, we try to ensure that people adhere to these principles too. Ask Ubuntu (part of Stack Exchange, not Canonical), for example, also requires people to adhere to the Ubuntu CoC. Ubuntu Forums and IRC have similar behaviour guidelines.

Does that mean it's always civil? Of course not... But it does mean that nobody's surprised when people are tossed out for being needlessly rude and the non-technical flame wars of the late 90s just don't happen.

<comment><USER46> I'm not an Ubuntu contributor, but I have to give credit to the Ubuntu community in that they _do_ try to create a welcoming place for contributors. Of course, no one's perfect and I'm sure someone will dig up a counterexample, but this has been my experience over the course of many years of interactions with the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Re: "the Open Source community is full of assholes"

s/Open Source community/human race/

Also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law)

<comment><USER48> true. there's nothing different from open source ppl that makes them more kind, or compassionate than the average human being.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> > By many he [Linus] is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one.

I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux.

It is not a positive characteristic. I wish he wasn't as abrasive but that is his personality.

What I feel Poettering is doing here is a bit of a "well on technical merits Linus was right but I'll attack his abrasiveness instead". I suspect this is related to the 'debug' flag and Linus chewing out one of the systemd developers. I think Linus was justified in chewing him out. Maybe shouldn't have used expletives, but still justified. And I understand it was a pattern of behavior of leaving bugs in their wake and so on.

> If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of > this behaviour.

Hard to say. Maybe so. Maybe if he wouldn't be as critical and as abrasive we would have had a different OS or different community. Maybe better. Maybe worse. hard to say.

<comment><USER50> > I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the > team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no > Linux.

This attitude is precisely the problem. Being a smart or successful human being does not alleviate your obligation to be a decent human being - <USER2> does having strong opinions and good reasons for them.

The argument you have made comes in another form, and I hope when I phrase it this way you'll see why I disagree strongly: "Do you know who I am?!"

<comment><USER51> I think there's another facet to the argument he made that he didn't make. When you're in a position of power and you have to deal with the work of other people you want to waste as little time as possible on people making stupid mistakes that shouldn't be made in the first place. You want to bring the quality of your contributors up.

One way of doing this is making people fear making mistakes. Society does this all the time: if you are a racist/homophobe/sexist people will ostracize you publicly in a number of ways. Essentially you get rid of racists/homophobes/sexists by making them fear voicing those opinions.

I personally don't think this is a particularly good way of dealing with problems, but it's what society does and it's how it works: based on mostly punishment. To then go on to say that what Linus does is somehow bad or any different seems kinda weird.

<comment><USER50> Fear, as you seem to realize, is a crappy motivator. It only work in limited circumstances and for limited periods of time. It doesn't really change behavior permanently. That "society" does it doesn't make it any better (and when was the last time a judge cussed out a defendant for receiving a guilty verdict?)

But I would argue that motivating through fear isn't even relevant to this situation. Is making death threats in order to convince somebody to stop doing something a valid way to motivate through fear? Is cursing somebody out on a mailing list really all that terrifying? If it is, is that the reason Linus, for instance, does it?

I think the answer to all of these is no.

Further, it may be appropriate to shame racists, homophobes or sexists into changing their ways (or, I would argue, just not espousing their views publicly). But is it really appropriate to do this, to this extent especially, to programmers who wrote bad code?

Programming relies on rational, careful cognitive consideration of problems. That's the opposite of what fear inspires. Fear-based "motivation" is lousy in general, and doubly lousy for open source software.

<comment><USER51> >Is making death threats in order to convince somebody to stop doing something a valid way to motivate through fear?

I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the people who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats are not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and not an example of how the community behaves.

>Is cursing somebody out on a mailing list really all that terrifying?

I think it is since public shaming tends to be effective in preventing whatever behavior was shamed, as per the racist/homophobe/sexist argument.

>If it is, is that the reason Linus, for instance, does it?

I can't speak for him but if I were in charge of an important and sizable project I can see myself doing it for that reason.

>But is it really appropriate to do this, to this extent especially, to programmers who wrote bad code? Programming relies on rational, careful cognitive consideration of problems. That's the opposite of what fear inspires. Fear-based "motivation" is lousy in general, and doubly lousy for open source software.

I don't follow why it's doubly lousy for software in general. Software has its fair share of opinionated debates that are more about differences of philosophy rather than careful cognitive consideration of problems. And as for it being the opposite of what fear inspires, I'm not sure I agree. The educational system world wide uses fear effectively and it seems to mostly work (despite whatever problems you may have with it), so I don't see what would make programming special in that regard.

<comment><USER50> >I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the people who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats are not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and not an example of how the community behaves.

In this statement I was referring to the issue being discussed in this particular thread, not to Linus. Sorry, should have been clearer.

> I think it is since public shaming tends to be effective in preventing > whatever behavior was shamed, as per the racist/homophobe/sexist argument.

But as I said - it doesn't change behavior, it only changes whether or not one publicly displays one's thoughts. And even then, it's a temporary effect at best.

> I don't follow why it's doubly lousy for software in general. Software has > its fair share of opinionated debates that are more about differences of > philosophy rather than careful cognitive consideration of problems. And as > for it being the opposite of what fear inspires, I'm not sure I agree. The > educational system world wide uses fear effectively and it seems to mostly > work (despite whatever problems you may have with it), so I don't see what > would make programming special in that regard.

It's lousy because it doesn't inspire real change. People don't change their opinions because they got chewed out, even if it was rightfully so. They just learn to resent the people doing the chewing out and oppose them more subtly.

You use our education system as an example - but I don't know that I'd say the education parts of the system (as opposed to the discipline parts, whose effectiveness I would frankly dispute) aren't fear-based. They're generally built to be merit-based (whether they succeed is outside the scope of this discussion).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> As a data point and a side note: I've been participating in open source discussions for more than 15 years now. This issue seems to come up more and more, and it seems that many communities are deteriorating. Lennart is right about Linus setting a bad example.

But not all is gloomy. As a positive example, the Clojure community has always impressed me with its maturity. People are incredibly nice and helpful, discussions are constructive. Bad tone is immediately struck down. And it is true that a lot depends on the leader — Rich Hickey sets the example here and people follow.

<comment><USER53> Exactly. Project leaders have the power to set the tone of discussions within their communities. If abusive people are moderated, they don't propagate, and the community gets more welcoming.

However this does not address the inter-project nastiness that the OP refers to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I certainly agree that there some Open source projects that are extremely toxic, like the Linux Kernal, but I wish people wouldn't say all open source is that way. The author has been through a lot of crazy shit for very silly reasons, note I'm not blaming him in any way - no one should go through that over volunteering free work. But I've contributed to Django, Flask, Python, Meotor, and Node.js in different ways and though it's varied in how pleasant the experience has been for the most part these communities were really awesome, when dealing with the core teams. I think those are good examples of better open source communities and I think they will tend to pick up more developers that aren't willing to put up with all of the crap involved in the Linux project.

</comment><comment><USER55> I don't think it is fair to generalize this to all of Open Source. The Linux kernel and the Systemd controversy in particular do not represent all of Open Source. That said, I do think Lennart has very valid and important points about the Linux kernel and the Linux community and specifically the Systemd controversy. It's too bad.

But switching to Mac OS doesn't fix this, if we wanted to talk about that then there is a whole set of separate issues there.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm glad Lennart wrote this, though obviously I'm sorry he had to do it.

I'd like to think this would open up a bigger dialog about the truly decrepit level of discourse that is common on all too many OSS projects (not all, of course, but many of them, and oftentimes, the older, the more nasty), but I'm not that idealistic.

I don't think anyone, least of all Lennart, would say that his projects (particularly PulseAudio and systemd) aren't up for criticism or discussion, but what has happened to him has gone beyond criticism and into just nasty territory.

But here's my question:

With so much of OSS being funded by large corporations (often through these corps sponsoring employees to work on stuff full time), when do we finally drop the "it's all volunteers so this shit is acceptable" mantra.

It's not all volunteers. It's people volunteering their time and collectively sharing the source/combining efforts, but make no mistake, OSS is a huge enterprise and is primarily funded by the Fortune 500. I cannot imagine that the discourse that happens in some of these mailing lists and forums would be allowed to exist without consequence if they were happening on an official company listserv. I cannot imagine that Red Hat or IBM or whoever would let this go on on their official channels without HR getting involved.

So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels?

Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo. Time for the whole movement to grow up and be accountable to treating people like human beings.

<comment><USER57> >> So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels?

>> Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo.

I wonder if this isn't part of the problem. Many of the massive open-source blow-ups have been between people who are being paid to do it. It's not like a guy from Red Hat, for example, can just pick a different project to contribute to. His jobs depends on working in these abusive environments. The only way to stop contributing would be to get a different job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This reminded me of the "This is Phil Fish: A case study in internet celebrity" video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW- owa2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w)

Phil Fish is an indie game developer, internet-famous for the game Fez. And "everybody" hates him. Though as the video explains, it's more complicated than that.

The video is notably also as being referenced by Notch (creator of Minecraft) as part of the reason why he decided to go into semi-retirement after the sale of Mojang.

<comment><USER12> That video is Phil's friend defending him by ignoring reality and saying "you are wrong because I say so". Phil started getting hate because he exploited people, ripped them off, abused them and acted like he was some sort of genius for making a game he didn't even make, which won an award that was won because his investor owns the contest and judged the entries.

The hate grew to massive portions mainly because of his response to that initial hate. You can't insult everyone and expect them to thank you for it.

<comment><USER59> Can you provide any examples for that?

<comment><USER12> [http://www.lazygamer.net/pc-gaming/is-phil-fish-about-to- be-...](http://www.lazygamer.net/pc-gaming/is-phil-fish-about-to-be-arrested- for-racketeering/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm not sure how this pertains to Open Source communities across the board..? Seems to be a pretty targeted indictment of the Linux dev community. There are plenty that don't stand for the type of bad acting described here.

<comment><USER20> The problem is that the Linux kernel is one of the longer running and most influential open source communities so too many people have picked up the idea that because Linus can say something mean, it's okay for them to do it, too — as long as they're technically correct, of course, but which flame-warrior doesn't believe that they're correcting an error?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I sometime think whether some people, especially people like Lennart did not experience bullying at school and would prefer the internet be policed to prevent any "attacks" made towards them.

Sometimes you just need to take it on the chin and carry on.

Maybe it's because I'm from the UK and you just expect the the world to shit on you whenever possible, I'm not really affected by outright attacks and offensiveness, but I probably wouldn't let anyone get to me, like Lennart shows.

</comment><comment><USER62> The whole post is just a weak assertion. Linus does run a really large project with many, sometimes random, contributors quite efficiently and it's not possible to tell whether it's because, despite, or regardless of his style with a sample of one.

I'm also reasonably sure that Lennart Poettering's experience does not generalize. He is rather unique within the Linux community.

</comment><comment><USER63> A psychologist friend mentioned that invoking 2nd person (you) often escalates conflict. I wonder what it would take to write a thread parser that bounces comments with "you" as the focal point?

Sentiment analysis probably has some utility if bad commits are clustered around a particular contributor. Would it be more product to represent sentiment as a graph? What would it look like?

</comment><comment><USER64> Some people are attributing this phenomenon to the internet, but I don't think that's accurate. I studied Russian history in college and the writings of various members of the communist intelligentsia had the same vitriol. Particularly the writings between Lenin and Karl Kautsky. My professors called it "maximalism", a term that hasn't caught on in general use. It's meaning is the belief that anyone that disagrees with you even in small ways, disagrees with you fully. I think this attitude is what occurs in OS communities, where people who generally agree find themselves in angry exchanges.

</comment><comment><USER65> Maybe these strong reactions from core linux engineers have meaning. Maybe strong reactions from large parts of the user base have meaning.

Maybe one reaps what one sows.

<comment><USER55> People also reap things that somebody else sowed, or that nobody sowed. There is no physical law that anyone will be treated fairly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This post would be interesting if there wasn't the "all others do it except us" accusation. Systemd zealots are exactly the same with any other open source community's zealots and systemd's diva devs are exactly the same with any other open source diva devs.

</comment><comment><USER67> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele)

Linus's approach is a cultural thing.

<comment><USER27> A lot of discriminatory or hateful actions can be written off as cultural. Racism is cultural in the Southern US. Doesn't mean it's acceptable.

<comment><USER67> Absolutely. I'm not saying it's acceptable, only giving background. "I'm being blunt." "I'm just being honest". etc. These are not excuses for being an asshole. The same information can be shared without being an asshole about it. Being an asshole towards others publicly on the mailing list is just another form of bullying. If he wanted to be blunt or whatever, he could do it in private messages. There is no need to publicly shame people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> POETTERING EFFECT - It appears that lately some Linux developers are concentrating on changing things (that work fine) with no particular reason, breaking existing functionality in the process and running away before the job is really finished (sometimes called the Poettering effect), while in fact it would be better to make a nicely polished finished system that can be used from installation without having to tune it up.

</comment><comment><USER69> never cared who is behind a nick on the other side of the cable, if he is white,black,yellow,green or pink. But i like the banter and sometimes people are cursing at others not because of gender, race or any other factor but because of emotions. If PC will get over everything soon it will be not acceptable to say anything. Is this the internet we all fought for ? In internet it doesn't matter who you are.

<comment><USER69> in interwebs you can be even atari owner...Yes even them are welcome and it doesn't matter guy is atari owner. So why mix in chat about kernel patch code that he is an atari owner ? he can't change it, and it doesn't matter. But should he get less flame because he owns atari ? no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other.

In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated to some degree. Online, in a domain where technical merit is king, however, things tend to remain more dysfunctional than in real life. Some open source groups make an effort to curate their communities and shun this behavior (for example the SVN devs wrote about intentionally doing this on mailing lists IIRC). I imagine some groups are not quite so organized, however, especially very large groups.

I think Lennart's experience favors this anecdotal theory: The more technical communities (Gentoo is given an example - and you have to be more comfortable getting your hands dirty to run Gentoo than to run a distro like Ubuntu or Fedora) empirically appear to be more dysfunctional.

I actually avoid going to technical conferences anymore since this dysfunction and awkwardness is always intense and tiring/difficult to deal with. I'm not exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a large number of social situations by friends/family growing up since I have always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself.

This doesn't only affect us, by the way. When I was young I worked several blue-collar jobs (construction) and it was a very dysfunctional boys-club type social environment as well, but in a different way.

I love what I do, but there's a lot of weirdos here. I try not to be one. :)

EDIT: Removed ignorant aspergers comment.

<comment><USER71> _> This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other._

Apparently, it also manifests itself in taking things too seriously, not being able to understand the nuanced meaning behind insulting words, and reducing a person's personality to a few mean things he's said.

Nice sexist remark, btw.

<comment><USER70> _Nice sexist remark_

My comment about men being more prone to unbalanced personality or are you referring to something else?

<comment><USER71> Yes, for "[women] generally being more balanced personality-wise then men".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Odd, I've never had a problem from the open source projects I've developed or contributed too. In fact, I've made more friends from it than enemies.

I suppose the pressure of these projects is small compared to something important like a driver or operating system... but perhaps that says more about people than open source.

</comment><comment><USER73> I think this very much depends on your own attitude. Sure, there are assholes who will say things about how useless is your project and how they hate you for it, but this is not the norm in open source. And it's definitely not the norm when it comes to developers, not users. I have worked with various people in open source, including some that are known to be "not good at dealing with people", but I never had a serious problem with them.

In fact, just a few weeks ago I had a wonderful experience contributing a patch to cairo. You meet a new person and you are working together with the goal of the best quality code. I was not doing much open source development for some time and it was amazing how great it felt again.

</comment><comment><USER74> I actually see that language as creative and funny, don't say because I'm not the target audience. I forgot the comedian who said that he likes to cross the line then come back to bring some people with him.

I appreciate the work that is being done in open source community, the language part I don't really care much as long as it's to make a point. If you don't like that community, why don't you just fork the kernel and call it whatever you like. Nobody prevents you from doing that then you become the jail keeper and show what you can do to the world.

</comment><comment><USER75> Conflating the Open Source community at large with the Linux community, the Linux development community, and the Linux kernel development community does not help him make his case.

<comment><USER10> Laying boycots, campaigns to fund a hitman via bitcoin and irc harassment at the feet of Linus doesn't help either.

I won't argue that Linus' attitude has no influence in general, but the categorical differences between this and Linus' hyperbole make it a red herring for the conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> > I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are > really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of > assholes, and I probably more than most others am one of their most > favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have > started multiple "petitions" on petition web sites, asking me to stop > working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to > hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot > posted a "song" on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me > and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my > projects, containing pretty personal attacks. On IRC, people /msg me > sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. > And there's more. A lot more.

My jaw dropped. Feelings about systemd aside (I actually quite like it), this is uncalled for, and outrageously bad.

Grow up! Hiring a hitman? Are you for real?

Anytime someone makes a large project that gets traction, people are going to disagree; that does not make it acceptable to launch personal attacks, and call for violence against the developer.

As a community, we need to call out the people doing this and show it's not acceptable; irregardless of any politics that may be involved.

</comment><comment><USER77> The problem with many self-organized groups of engineers is that they equate meritocracy with technical contributions.

This is a very, very limited way of approaching the complex dynamics of people working together. It shows up in many ways. Most open source communities are not good places for people who can contribute design, documentation and god forbid, people _management_ skills.

A pervasive illusion amongst software engineers is that we can do without "soft" skills, and nowhere does this manifests itself more in places where no boss or company forcefully adds those soft skills into the mix.

Some open source communities are lucky enough to have people that have both the technical chops to get respect based on technically focused meritocratic values and have other "management" skills. Most don't. So once conflict arises (as it inevitably will, because they are human beings) and simple meritocracy no longer suffices (because both sides are smart and contribute), the community either breaks up or devolves into a permanent Lord of the Flies atmosphere.

It has nothing to do with Open Source in general. It's the lack of value placed on soft skills in tech driven meritocracies.

(You can see the same thing in tech start-ups founded by technies, but there it usually gets quickly corrected after the first PR disaster.)

</comment><comment><USER78> The author of this g+ post is the author of "systemd", a controversial new program being installed by default into some of the most popular distributions of the GNU/Linux operating system.

It seems that some Linux users are unhappy with systemd.

While I do not agree with any user being disrespectful to the author by targeting him personally, the fact that users are seriously upset about systemd as a program gives me hope for the future of the popular Linux distributions.

When the author says "Open Source is awful" maybe he is revealing his true colors. Perhaps he is better suited to closed source development which is insulated from public review by users and other developers at-large. But that is for him to decide.

There was a post on HN a little while back by the developer of a popular glibc alernative for Linux who told us he has been using a flat, linear /etc/rc file for over a decade and his boot times are substantially shorter than with systemd. But more importantly, his approach is simple by comparison. How many users will be able to debug systemd by examining the internals?

It is this type of "hands-on" user that gives me hope for the future of the distributions that are experimenting with systemd. I hope these users will speak up if they have not done so already.

</comment><comment><USER79> The Linux kernal dev community is a community of rough tough programmer bastards. If you can't handle the knocks there, maybe that's not the community for you? I'm sure there are other less abrasive communities you can join? It certainly says a lot about someone who believes that they are entitled to join a community and to demand to have their voice heard and to have the community adapt to their wants and desires. I believe that sort of influence is earned within a community.

I mean, I wouldn't join /r/kkk and expect everyone to "chill out on the use of the N word guys". Maybe, just maybe, I'm not as important to that community as I believe myself to be?

Urgh, I can't believe I'm typing this, but the phrase "be the change you want to see" applies for community membership. Be the beacon of conduct you want the community to share. Inspire the community to aim for those ideals through example.

Or write a snarky blog post about it because you're finding it difficult to get mind share on an obviously flawed project.

<comment><USER79> Why the down vote? I never apologized for the violence leveled at him, just that you are not entitled to be a member of any community, and that you cannot expect the culture of a community to change simply because you want it to.

Communities require membership contribution to change. You want to change the culture, you have to get involved. IF the communities culture is too poisonous for you, then maybe that's not the community for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Re this part, about Linus Torvalds being aggressive and insulting to his contributors:

      But no, it's not an efficient way to run a community. If
      Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite,
      not because of this behaviour.

You have to have been utterly brilliant to invent git. I don't know enough about operating system internals to say if the same is true for Linux, but I know enough about git to say it's true for git.

So Linus was brilliant enough to invent git, and is widely known to be a complete asshole to his contributors.

He rarely brags about being a genius - in fact I believe I've seen him on video making modest statements about being overrated and not really that smart - but he often argues that being an asshole to his contributors is a wise and effective form of management.

To me, he seems like an epoch-definingly great hacker who nonetheless has absolutely no clue what his own strengths and weaknesses are.

<comment><USER81> I'm not sure git is an example of capital-G Genius, since Linus had been using BitKeeper, a commercial distributed revision control system, for about five years by the time he wrote git.

Git is good, but it's not new.

<comment><USER33> More importantly, Linus took a good look at Monotone, with which git has a lot more in common than with BitKeeper... and the same is true of Matt Mackall/Mercurial of course.

The incremental improvements in git/Mercurial were of course significant in getting wide adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Huge egos and insults are things that have always bothered me in the OSS community. Just some days ago the Crockford vs. fat thread on github resurfaced and shocked a lot of people on HN [0]. It certainly has stopped from releasing stuff in the past. Lately, though, I've been having an awesome experience with a few of my really simple open source projects. I've been receiving a few emails with requests in the most polite way possible, some of them even thanking me for my small contribution. Recently I've even got a pull request from a guy who out of the blue designed an icon for my android app. These things are priceless to me, and certainly motivate me much more than the bad parts demotivate me.

[0] [https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5...](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5135512)

</comment><comment><USER83> This article reminded me of what Valerie Aurora[1] posted & discussed. She called for feminism values, and Lennart is calling for less hate. I get the feeling they are both talking of the same underlying problem.

On a personal note, when GIMP 2.6 first came out, I filled a bug report pointing to the devs that under Windows XP sans SP2, the program would crash on load. Instead of getting a real answer, I got some angry comments about not updating my OS and a ban from the bug tracking system. Some time later, they added Windows XP SP2 as a requirement. I still use GIMP, but whenever I find a bug, I just wait patiently until the next version to see if they have fixed it.

[1] HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180)

Edit: found the bug report, it was SP2, not SP1 as I first thought. Also fixed some typos.

</comment><comment><USER84> Ehh, you just have to look past the arguments and inane people. I run a small- to-medium open source project (the Min CSS framework, [http://mincss.com](http://mincss.com)) and I get plenty of inane comments, criticism, and personal attacks. However, I also get plenty of nice comments that make it all worthwile. For a project as large as systemd, I imagine that this is many orders of magnitude more extreme.

As with any group of people, the assholes are the loudest, and if you're writing software for a huge group of people a bunch of them are going to be really loud assholes.

</comment><comment><USER85> Welcome to the Internet? Hack with people irl and this happens way less often.

</comment><comment><USER86> This coming from the man who, when people point out flaws in his design of systemd, says basically "too bad, I'm doing it anyway, and if you don't like it, you can take a hike."

<comment><USER87> That sound like an entirely reasonable thing to say. If you don't like it, you can choose to boycott his system.

It would become unreasonable if he opened his emails with " _YOU_ are full of bullshit. "

<comment><USER86> Ah, I see I've found yet another person who only reads the inflammatory email by Torvalds, but doesn't bother to read the preceding thread where the person Torvalds is addressing refused to admit his mistake, and further, insisted that other people work around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I think people might be overthinking the problem here. Whenever someone is really good at one thing (say, programming), it is easy for them to get away with being really bad at others (say, manners).

It's the same reason college athletes get away with breaking so many rules.

And both situations are very hard to solve due to the competing and conflicting interests involved.

On a personal level, we should all try our best to stop people (ourselves included) from being programmer bullies. And I've seen many people work very hard to do so!

</comment><comment><USER89> Never had to participate in linux kernel development, so can't really comment on it (although I hear Linus can be rude).

But open source != linux kernel. There are so many small, large, medium project, that if you really want to - you can find where to contribute. It works the best when you actually need to fix something you use and you have developer expertise to fix it. But even when you can describe in details bug or feature - this is often is very welcomed by project maintainers.

</comment><comment><USER90> Hehe, around the line about the community being mainly about white males in their 30's and 40's, I for some reason felt that the Hitler card was coming :P

</comment><comment><USER91> This is a duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859)

</comment><comment><USER92> The Open Source community is young, like the rest of the field of software engineering, and we're still childish and uncivil towards one another, derived from a root of individualism, fed by the promise of a vast and plentiful uncharted territory.

Eventually we will install a system that will protect ourselves from one another. I hope it's a good one.

On a more specific note, PulseAudio sucks and I could care less what Lennart thinks.

</comment><comment><USER93> Desktop/non-mobile link: [https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...](https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/J2TZrTvu7vd)

It's apparently impossible to go back to the desktop version from the mobile page. The "View Desktop" link in the footer takes you to the G+ homepage. Well done, Google.

</comment><comment><USER94> Maybe video should replace written text in some of these exchanges. I think that someone having to record themselves would make them think twice and maybe rephrase some heinous language. Written word also has the disadvantage of not conveying non-verbal body language and can also be misinterpreted. Not sure this solution would be widely accepted though, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER95> It's a shame that ones personal experiences result in generalizations that are then attached to Open Source. People can and will be assholes in any kind of project or group. That has not got a lot to do with Open Source. It would be fairer to say: "I had many bad experiences with the Open Source communities I was involved with".

</comment><comment><USER96> I've had some arguments with people but in large part it is pleasant to work with most people in the open source world. I was just at JavaOne and "everybody meets at conferences for beers" really does happen. For smaller projects most developers are extremely happy when someone takes any interest in their project.

</comment><comment><USER97> Non Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this. You have said nothing.

</comment><comment><USER98> Can someone here clue me in about why mailing lists still appear to be the de- facto platform for communication for a lot of open source projects - particularly those that are centered around kernel development and other low level "stuff"?

<comment><USER99> Because the alternative is web forum software, none of which is as good at thread management ("alert me to replies to this thread", "hide this thread", "beep when Jane Smith posts") as a good email client. Also, email is ubiquitous: you can follow and participate in conversations from a phone as easily as a desktop. Finally, you only have to learn _one_ email client, and can then use those skills on every mailing list you join. That's in contrast with "project Foo uses SomeBoard v1.3 and has this new feature, but project Bar uses SomeBoard v1.1 and doesn't have it yet. Project Baz uses OtherBoard 0.6 which has this one cool thing but lacks have the features of SomeBoard."

Remember, this is the same group of people that gets passionately whipped up about text editors. Can you imagine them _not_ having strong opinions about forum interfaces? Defaulting to good old email and letting everyone use their interface of choice is probably the only practical way to get everyone to participate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> discussion about petition on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3385276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3385276)

</comment><comment><USER101> Previous discussion with a less flame-bait title:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859)

</comment><comment><USER102> I just want to point out that there needs to be a more clear distinction between "open source" and FOSS "Free open source software". They are two very different things, and I have found that while there are fundamental issues rearing their ugly head in the development model (many eye's theory is on it's last leg, which is why I push the reduced code theory, which is just my made up theory), much of the vitriol happens in the "open source" community and less so in the FOSS community.

The title is a bad on because it lacks this distinction.

</comment><comment><USER6> The thing that is awful about "Open Source" is that it was a term coined by Eric S Raymond in order to attack Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and to make a name and money for himself as a so-called "hacker", without actually having to write any useful code, or even read anybody else's code and report bugs with his very own "millions of I's".

If you want to see how the Open Source fish rots from the head down, you have to look no further than Eric Raymond's own blog: "In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129)

Or in his own words: "And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome." [http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet.org/)

"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond)

"Ego is for little people" "[bla bla bla...] I've blown up the software industry once, reinvented the hacker culture twice, and am without doubt one of the dozen most famous geeks alive. Investment bankers pay me $300 an hour to yak at them because I have a track record as a shrewd business analyst. I don't even have a BS, yet there's been an entire academic cottage industry devoted to writing exegeses of my work. I could do nothing but speaking tours for the rest of my life and still be overbooked. [...bla bla bla]" (...and on and on ad nausium -- he really needs to work on his BS!) [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404)

The hacker culture can do just fine without ESR's "reinventions", thank you. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728146) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727953)

<comment><USER103> Don't forget HIV denial:

"I believe, but cannot prove, that global "AIDS" is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine."

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184)

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Poettering's M.O. is basically to force people to adopt changes that piss off a lot of people, and then whine when he doesn't get his way or he gets push back by standards boards who aren't interested in his personal agenda. Keep flouncing, Lennart. I'm sure this is the best way to get people to be nice to you or adopt your changes.

<comment><USER105> I liked your original pre-edit comment, since it portrayed your attitude even better:

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahaha

Was about to argue the merit of this post, then noticed the author. Almost got me, Poettering ;-) Just another social/political manipulation to get his way at the expense of others. I would feel bad for the guy if he wasn't such a whiny prick the rest of the time."

I especially like how you admit that if this letter was anonymous, you would actually consider the argument, but since it's a particular person you dislike, you're OK with people advocating violence and attempting to hire hitmen.

Stay classy.

<comment><USER104> Yeah, I figured explaining my opinion was more valid than the verbal diahhrea I initially concocted. But since I never took a position on whether his treatment was fair, I think your attempt to paint me as an advocate of violence is a lot less classy. To be clear, it's not that I dislike him personally, it's that he's an open source troll and this is just more trolling. I'm sure he's a lovely person when he isn't shitting on Linux.

<comment><USER106> Lennart is producing lots of software that many people find useful to solve real problems.

If you don't have these problems you're free to not use them.

If your distro maintainer choose to integrate with software produced by Lennart it's because it either solves real problems for them or are simply too dumb to be trusted.

In the first case it would be appropriate to trust the decision of qualified people, but if you fall in the latter care you're still free to change distro given the assumed incompetence of your maintainers.

I still don't see how this makes Lennart a troll.

<comment><USER104> > If you don't have these problems you're free to not use them.

Uh, no. Major distributions have adopted his software into the core of their product and it is virtually impossible to substitute it. These distros happen to be the only approved vendors for most major private and public sector commercial software. We're not free to not use it.

> you're still free to change distro given the assumed incompetence of your > maintainers

See above.

> I still don't see how this makes Lennart a troll.

Besides the fact that most of the Linux kernel dev team thinks he and his cronies are asshats? Besides the way he's designed his software to be the polar opposite model of the operating system he's building it for? Besides the fact that he's insulting all of the people he purports to write software for and with, ignoring the fact that almost no one else has been treated this way?

Besides all of that, it's a troll because he's basically just said 'fuck you' to everyone who develops open source software and now his fanboys and detractors are all arguing over it. It's a very effective troll indeed.

<comment><USER106> If those major distributions have adopted it they may have had some reasons to do so, isn't it?

So you basically don't trust the maintainers of major distribution, yet you rely on them to provide certificated support (which I guess is the reason why you require approval).

This is a problem in your organization and has really nothing to do with Lennart.

I share the opinion that some people in the kernel team should reconsider the way they express themseves, but if you judge based on who has not been insulted on LKML you'd be left with _very few_ people. Linus himself recently said that he has no strong opinion on systemd and in fact uses it.

I won't discuss your accusation that his software is "the polar opposite model of the operating system he's building it for", it's just your idea of said OS and probably doesn't match what the majority of the developers of said OS think.

We probably read very differently what Lennart said, but I'm quite sure e didn't say "'fuck you' to everyone who develops open source software".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> +1. But then, is it necessary? Jobs and Gates were not exactly moderate, as far as we know.

<comment><USER108> They weren't managing volunteer communities.

<comment><USER71> They weren't giving their software away for free either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Communities with corporate stewards are a lot more civil for obvious reasons

</comment><comment><USER110> Seriously why would you work on open source if the community is that bad. It's not open source in general though. Some projects are great fun to work on. Just change which project you're working on.

</comment><comment><USER12> This trend towards using victim status from trolls as a shield to ignore real criticism is really unfortunate. Linus's criticism of redhat and redhat employees is perfectly reasonable and valid. Trying to distract attention from it and pretend he is just some evil bully nobody should listen to is incredibly childish and counter productive.

</comment><comment><USER111>
        The Linux community is dominated by western, white,
        straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days.

Could it be that this is a purely cultural thing? If the fish rots from the head, then isn't something about the culture to be blame? Outside of race but purely from a group of straight males who are probably sexually repressed, beta male, grew up in a individualistic society free to express oneself naturally give rise to such Spartan environment?

Imagine if the linux community consisted mostly of Korean or Japanese males, both countries with strong Neo-confucian values of social hierarchy and mutual respect, avoiding harsh words. But maybe such culture are not apt at producing new ideas but retaining old ones.

</comment><comment><USER112> More info that points to what caused all the hate - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering)

</comment><comment><USER113> I read this article and was very confused about how somebody could create an open source project that lead to actual death threads. Then I googled Lennart Poettering and it all made sense. PulseAudio and systemd make for a particularly wretched resume: Poettering is probably responsible for more frustration to Linux users than anybody else right now. Not that I'm not going to condone online harassment or blame the victim, but I am a little happy that this harassment is based on technical merits instead of appearance or sexual orientation as is normally the case.

<comment><USER114> Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them. Yet the software seems quite popular.

Sometimes someone has to step up to do the dirty work and write software that can only give mediocre results. I think he's getting flack as the scapegoat for the general consumerization of Linux (ala ubuntu, gnome, etc).

Really, if people don't like these systems, or if they weren't worth the trouble, why not do something about it? They sound like itches that could be scratched. That was the spirit of a previous, less popular open source movement. Now it's full of useless bitching assholes who will spend 10x the time complaining over time actually fixing.

Note: I'm not saying that you personally are in that category. But this guy should be able to respond with "fix it, fork it, or fuck off."

<comment><USER115> >> Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them.

This is simply not true. Both systems were effectively pushed down everybody's throats because RedHat (through Fedora) made it that way. There were lots of competing options that we NEVER going to get consideration because they were "not invented here."

That is the thing that frustrates people most about him. That he may be a good developer, but what he does has less to do with engineering merit and more to do with politics.

<comment><USER114> (I'm not asking combatitively, I'm genuinely curious)

Wouldn't RedHat be the one to blame here? And the complicity of other distro vendors who also included it? RedHat doesn't back KDE, but KDE does quite well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> Fourteen year old kids were telling me that they were going to skullfuck my grandmother with a rake over Xbox Live, a decade ago, just because I killed them once or twice in Halo 2. Internet insults have always been ridiculously over the top, it's nothing new. Nobody is actually going to rape or kill her over this, you're a massive idiot if you think for even a split second that they would.

<comment><USER117> It does seem like there's an awful lot of energy being expended on stopping 14 year old boys from being assholes. I suspect it's about as likely to work as efforts to stop teenagers from having sex. At least quixotic quests are entertaining from the sidelines.

<comment><USER118> This post was about grown men, not fourteen-year-olds. Grown men... as in, people who should know better.

<comment><USER117> Oh of course. But I was responding to a particular comment, so context is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> Anything is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this.

</comment><comment><USER120> If it is so bad, do not use it!

One could always pay $1000/hour and get his software from someone with correct attitude, sex, race and age. If you pay $0 do not complain!

</comment><comment> digital-rubber Systemd and PulseAudio are getting pushed down everybody's throat, unasked for. They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy.

Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to infect nearly all distributions with systemd.

And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought. It's a task, work where their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any other term you think applies! That's what is wrong with people, we are all a bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by choosing the life of suffering. It's in our nature.

Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a product as i don't want to use another insulting term, as the author apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post as he did, if you DO NOT care).

If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need address so much bitching about your 'stuff' and still feel like stuffing it down everybody's throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY?

Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared and or opposed by many, deal with it.

<comment><USER121> >They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy.

The community invites you to produce something superior. PulseAudio and systemd may have their own problems, but they're in place for a reason. I don't think they were selected due to some irrational hero worship for Poettering; they were selected because they were the most concise way to solve a real problem.

As much as one may dislike Pulse, it provides a unified, modern audio system that just works. I don't know if you remember the bad old days when it was a fight to get applications to play audio correctly, but that has gone away with the introduction of Pulse. For all of its potential problems and inefficiencies, it provides the basics in a reasonably accessible and universal manner.

>And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD.

It is optional. Open-source means you can run your own distro completely free of Poeterring's touch. You may have to deal with the legacy left by his projects, but that's nothing special; he had to deal with the legacy of ALSA et al and wrote compatibility layers that were major factors in the successful proliferation of PulseAudio.

>The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought.

I'm sure the nerds that are entrusted with the security and sanity of millions of systems across the world would disagree about whether "proper thought" was involved.

I don't really see a point in addressing the rest of your reply. Disagreement is fine, but please be civil. Poeterring and others in the community are obviously capable and they deserve acknowledgement and respect, which is a different thing than deference or worship. If you disagree, please disagree, but do so with civility. This shouldn't have to be complicated.

<comment> digital-rubber Please read the reply below to snowwrestler, check the PDF. As i think it also applies here.

Also please don't put to much faith in the people that roll the packages. It's a kind of dangerous assumption, see history for examples.

Also i fail to see where i have not been civil, I've tried so very hard. Not a single F-word in there ;-)

I agree it wouldn't have to be complicated at all, if simply a new distro was created fully based and compliant with the ideas of systemd, until its mature enough for others to adopt. Instead of overwriting the existing with something that certainly is not proven to be better or best for the job. And many are entering a road where they are not even sure systemd is going to end taking over things, unifying things, making all distros the same.</comment></comment></comment>