On the sickness of our community
On the sickness of our community
Posted Oct 9, 2014 14:39 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: On the sickness of our community by gb
Parent article: On the sickness of our community
Now he targets the community and leaders of the community in attempt to prove that key persons are assholes. Guys, community should work on technical issues and don't focus on personal relations.
This comes after literally years of people trying to convince us over and over again that Lennart Poettering is an asshole. What an insight.
I'm not really happy with Lennart's post either. It is clear that there is a serious problem but I don't think that Linus or the LKML crowd are directly to blame for the situation with systemd, Lennart Poettering's death threats etc. As such it is a bit of a cheap shot, especially since Lennart himself can be pretty abrasive if he wants to. Nobody in that discussion should be too eager to cast the first stone.
The sad thing is that something like systemd is urgently needed and there is nothing remotely similar around that has a more congenial developer community. The situation is not unlike the one before Postfix came out, when qmail was the go-to MTA but its developer community was a tornado compared to systemd's gentle summer breeze. The facts that Postfix was a lot less “my way or the highway” and Wietse Venema's crowd was a lot easier to get along with (not to mention the obvious difference between Wietse and DJB in the arrogance department) probably played a large role in Postfix's subsequent rise and qmail's descent into near-obscurity.
As long as nobody of Wietse Venema calibre steps up and delights us with a Postfix to systemd's qmail (and note that Postfix does what qmail does and then some, so simply forking systemd and leaving unwanted stuff out probably won't cut it) we seem to be stuck with systemd and its community. In the meantime it would probably be a lot better for everybody concerned if the general atmosphere around systemd could improve. That would include stopping the gratuitous “systemd sucks because it's not Unix and I don't like it” prayer mills as well as actively looking for reasonable cooperation and compromise on both sides in areas where systemd could be more accommodating without sacrificing technical excellence (the journald vs. rsyslog issue comes to mind).