On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 1:18 UTC (Thu) by warmcat (guest, #26416)
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Part of it is for some otherwise reasonable people they don't see "Lennart Poettering" as an individual but as a model on which to place all their fear and pain, doubt, feelings of loss of value of their knowledge, unwanted change, loss of control that are actually unrelated to him. It's like they already had that bad electricity flowing around and it found what looked a way to ground by frying him to a crisp with extreme vitriol.

When you read the certainty that "LP" is the devil, you also read obviously broken and sometimes not even technical reasoning, blathering appeals to "illegality" "broken social contracts" that do not exist and so on. And nothing balancing about the difficult technical innovations he has delivered and continues to deliver.

That simplifying demonization process (and the opposite, beautification of the undeserving beyond any reproach) is how humans operate: you can recognize someone is no longer having a conversation about something that is in both your realities and leave them be. But it doesn't help if they are threatening some physical manifestation of their mental state on the victim...

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 13:23 UTC (Thu) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link] (3 responses)

In other words, similar to why people are fervent in their hatred of Phil Fish (creator of the game FEZ). They became emotionally invested in seeing LP as a symbol of some great wrong and said/did things which, if re-examined in a different light, would harm their self image.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w

("If he's not an asshole, then I am!" as the video puts it.)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 20:20 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

That's brings what seem to be absurd reactions to things into a new light which makes a lot more sense. Thanks.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 21:32 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

okay that's a great video deconstructing a lot of things sort of floating around right now in the open source culture. Its a really great analysis video. Lots to think about. Lots and Lots.

I mean we can basically replace like 80% of most of the comment threads here with just this video anytime there's a non-technical discussion concerning notable personalities.

-jef"but I do get a chuckle out of the idea of LP as opensource's Nickelback"spaleta

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 22:04 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I just watched the video and also think that is a great, clear-headed analysis that is easily transferable to the current situation. When they say Nickleback represents the bad parts of the music industry I think that systemd represents fear of all of the new technologies which have cropped up since Linux 2.6 such as dbus, udev, netlink, cgroups, selinux, etc. which have been mostly ignored by those who learned *nix in the 80's and 90's and just kept doing things the way they always have done, but now can't be ignored because we are actually using them, so there is a huge amount of learning and feeling lost, fear of hard won experience becoming obsolete, even though all the new technologies have been there for 5-10 years and the fundamentals are unchanged.