On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 13:48 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by nim-nim
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Now Lennart is the archetypal example of coder prima dona who does not bother to be polite and will ruthlessly trample over other people feelings if he thinks he is technically right. That is why he generates such feelings even in "normal" people, nothing more, nothing less.

I don't think that this is actually the case. People don't seem to mind being treated the same way by Linus Torvalds and other icons of the community who are just as unwilling to suffer fools gladly. It also seems to be difficult to actually come up with concrete examples where Lennart Poettering was really rude (ruder than, e.g., someone like Linus would be) to somebody on a systemd mailing list. Which does not detract from the fact that it is a convenient meme to circle the wagons around even if there is no actual proof, and so it gets trotted out over and over again. Now as a matter of principle it would be great if on the whole there was more politeness around but if you think Lennart Poettering is rude then I would recommend you stay very far away from the likes of DJB or Theo de Raadt. In addition, there are people in systemd development who are way less abrasive, and while Lennart P is getting his attitude adjusted (or not) it might make sense to talk to them instead.

The main problem many people seem to have with Lennart Poettering is that he had the chutzpah to write PulseAudio and then not to bend over backward in order to clean up or work around other people's shit (such as bugs in other people's ALSA drivers). This attitude together with the fact that some distributions shipped PulseAudio while it was quite new and the bugs in the ALSA drivers in question had not yet been fixed gave him a bad reputation that was, if anything, only partially deserved, but is still good enough for “Lennart broke our systems with PulseAudio and is now going to break them again with systemd”.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 14:41 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

What is even worse is that the Alsa community has had the opportunity to stand up and correct this misconception towards pulseaudio and Lennart but instead have chosen to bury their head in the sand and turn a blind eye when individuals are cyberbullying Lennart in that regard which is quite frankly disgusting and arguably one of the reason this misconception about pulseaudio and Lennart has escalated this far in the first place...

One thing that those cyberbully's need to start understanding is that Lennart is and never has been acting alone but I guess it's easier for them to single out and attack one individual from within group of developers or a community regardless if he had any saying or doing or involvement in whatever they are trying to blame/frame him for, than the entire group or the community itself.