Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer [LWN.net]

Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 17, 2014 15:22 UTC (Mon) by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
Parent article: Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Anti-systemd people win the war through attrition - enough death threats, name calling, and nastiness will ensure no one wants to work on it.

A nice bunch to have in control of your distro.

There used to be a time when if you didn't like a piece of free software, you created something better.

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Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 17, 2014 18:44 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (7 responses)

But the goal of these people isn't to create, it's to destroy and through that destruction force other volunteers to do work.

Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 17, 2014 20:08 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (2 responses)

I suspect that membership in the group "these people" is negligible in this case.

Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 18, 2014 0:12 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

It only takes a handful of bullies to make the environment really miserable if they put some real effort into it. This seems to be one of the big recent lessons of the internet; a relatively small number of trolls are enough to drive people off the internet if they're willing to be sufficiently awful.

Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 18, 2014 8:05 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> It only takes a handful of bullies to make the environment really miserable if they put some real effort into it. This seems to be one of the big recent lessons of the internet

A recent case study from Peter Watts:

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5370

[And the person mentioned there is/was just *one* person. The sad thing is that even just one person behaving like this accretes a group of abusive minions who look up to their "leader".]

Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 20, 2014 4:59 UTC (Thu) by xxiao (guest, #9631) [Link] (3 responses)

It's different nowadays, most OSS developer are paid full-time employees, less people are going to create new software just because he does not like the existing one. Things change fast.

Without Redhat it's impossible for systemd to become so troublesome so fast. If Lennort did systemd in his spare time, this would be quite different and less destructive. He is controversial enough, now with Redhat's backup, it becomes fatal.

I don't care if systemd is good or bad technically, what I want is to have a choice, free software is about choice, if you don't honor that, please develop something else.

I see systemd as a tumor from Redhat that splits the linux community. Redhat's largest competitor is Debian-derivatives, systemd serves well for disrupting Debian.

Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 20, 2014 12:05 UTC (Thu) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

This is just dumb conspiracy theory crap. Red Hat's largest competitors are proprietary vendors, not other GNU/Linux distros. Red Hat is not big enough to develop GNU/Linux on its own, so disrupting or harming other distros would also harm Red Hat, especially a major distro like Debian that does loads of work for the ecosystem and the community. Additionally, many RH employees were Debian users before they got hired and continue to be Debian users now, so would be very unhappy if they were being used to harm it.

(But then I'm a full-time RH employee, so I'm probably being paid to say that and monitored by my controller to make sure I don't admit we're trying to destroy Debian, or whatever silly idea you want to believe.)

Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 23, 2014 22:51 UTC (Sun) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] (1 responses)

Please cite the sources and numbers backing up your assertion that "most OSS developer are paid full-time employees".

All the best,
Chris

Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

Posted Nov 24, 2014 18:48 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Well, there are a few things which need tweezed apart even in the assertion here. Do we mean developers by body count? Code output (not that measuring this isn't already fraught with various issues)? How do you split personal contributions from on-the-job contributions? Does *any* full-time employment put them into the category, or just ones which have some FOSS duties, or does it have to be 100% of the time is for FOSS? For some combination, things are, to me, leaning towards a definite yes (any full-time paired with either body count or code output), but others aren't so clear-cut.

So while numbers would be nice, let's get first make sure we know what we're asking for :) .