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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
