> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions.
That could possibly explain with it ends up in RedHat derivative distributions. It does not explain why so much of it ends up in a lot of the other big distro families, many of who have demonstrated perfect willingness to make choices that go actively against RedHat's direction in the past.
> That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" really doesn't endear him to folks here and elsewhere, especially in light of his own behavior.
Given the amount of abuse he's taking, he clearly has sufficient evidence to justify making that statement. It might not endear him to people to actually make it, but why would he care to endear himself to people that are giving him everything from rather disgusting levels of abuse to death threats?
> 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.
> I do believe there is a spirit of open source. Like, if everyone in the world behaved the “worst” they could while fulfilling all legal obligations, nothing would be functional at all anywhere.
Yeah, tell me about it, did I fail to mention I actually write widely used open source software, as opposed to the original complainer whose profile indicates little open source activity?
> In that vein, I hope they do contribute upstream where it makes sense to, at the very minimum, like applicable bug fixes.
And where’s the evidence that they aren’t already doing so? Where’s even the evidence that X410 is repackaging? I don’t know either way, but gp just started trashing the software because they sell licenses for 50 bucks a pop, which is not evidence for anything.
> He is out there on github writing flames, arguing with people that have a github account completely clean and never wrote possibly a line of code at all. Exposing himself in the process to insults and so forth.
I never understood why do people who have completely clean github accounts feel the need to preach to someone who has been programming for a long, long time and is the major force behind two of very significant, technically hard piece of software. This won't be the first time this has happened. In the "Linux on C++" thread, someone comes in and says "I am surprised you wrote git in C. Don't tell me C++ is bad. That's bullshit. Clearly I know more about this than you do". Or even the Eric Raymonds' post about "Curse of the gifted" - he comes out of nowhere and starts calling Linux names. The fact that other developers didn't even bother responding to his bullshit made me happy.
>I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS.
Same here. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, though. I mean, I'm pretty much a nobody. I haven't contributed to the kernel or created a perl module or created systemd so of course I haven't had any issues.
I'm sure Poettering isn't making this stuff up. People are so pissed at him for systemd and it makes no sense. And he's right to call out Linus for saying those things. Whether you think the people deserve this kind of abuse or not it's just toxic for the community at large and there isn't any reason to say stuff like that (I'm talking death threats or the most hurtful insults you can think of). If someone drops the ball don't take their work and ask them to leave - if they don't, you should be able to ignore them.
>Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day...
What he's actually talking about is a pattern of bad behavior. Of course there are going to be random assholes on the internet - that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about all of the abuse he gets from the actual community on a regular basis. Systemic abuse and vitriol.
I love open source. I owe my career to Linux and my passion about it. But that doesn't mean we can't make it better. And this internet bullying stuff is a real problem - it's very well documented. Ignoring the problem is the worst thing you can do short of contributing to it.
If we're going to have a real community then we have to make sure people feel safe and welcome.
>It seems weird that this guy will try to promote his product to the Linux community and chooses to do it by insulting its user base.
Please don't act like you are a representative sample of all linux users. FOSS centric guys are vocal but distributions like Ubuntu became very popular in part because they included and automatically installed proprietary wifi and GPU drivers right from their installer CD.
That you feel insulted reading someone talk about "fundamentalist FOSS" doesn't mean every linux user feels insulted reading the sentence.
> but he should keep his opinion on what _my_ machine should do for himself
Releasing free software and what you accuse him of are entirely different things. Frankly I'd like to understand how you even equate someone releasing software which you aren't even forced to use, to essentially ramming his opinions of how YOUR machine should run down your throat.
The anti-systemd people really aren't coming across at all well in this thread. At lot of what you guys are accusing him of literally makes no sense on the most basic level. This being a prime example.
Don't like systemd? Don't install systemd. Don't like that a distro is bundling systemd? Don't use the distro that is bundling systemd.
The creator of systemd cannot be held responsible for you voluntarily installing the software, leaving it on your system, and then becoming upset about how it works. If you installed systemd and hate it, remove it. It aint' rocket science.
>> Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them.
This is simply not true. Both systems were effectively pushed down everybody's throats because RedHat (through Fedora) made it that way. There were lots of competing options that we NEVER going to get consideration because they were "not invented here."
That is the thing that frustrates people most about him. That he may be a good developer, but what he does has less to do with engineering merit and more to do with politics.
> It's not like he was getting paid to work on this, was it?
That is completely beside the point. Do the Debian maintainers that were responsible for famous security slipups regarding SSH keys got paid? No. Would the backlash if they had been unwilling to fix the issues been warranted? Absolutely.
Once you are a part of people's infrastructure and these people rely on you to not be irresponsible, you can't afford to play the but-I-dont-get-paid-card. You can resign gracefully and let other people take over. If you put up a tantrum, you probably get your reputation burnt faster than a Google project gets when they suddenly pull the plug.
Open source is not some backyard game anymore. It involves companies and their commitment in form of infrastructure and participation.
Open source is like capitalism. But a project's success is measured in commitment instead of capital.
> And they have employed and still do employ many top tier open source developers who contribute open source code to a variety of projects. The money they make makes all of open source better!
I have to question that.
Nearly all of my worst experiences when using Linux have involved software that they or their developers have, to the best of my knowledge, been significantly involved with creating.
I'm thinking of software like systemd, PulseAudio, NetworkManager, GNOME 3, and Wayland, for example.
I've wasted far too much of my time dealing with unnecessary, silly, and inexcusable problems involving such software.
What makes it even worse is that despite me trying to avoid their ecosystem, their software has unfortunately still made it into other major distros, including Debian.
>Are you actually saying, without irony, that it's bullshit and baseless that Linus Torvalds, one of the most famously abusive OSS maintainers in history, had made people's lives worse by way of these actions?
Yes, at least on any scale that matters. He might have (temporarily) upset some people, but that doesn't even come close to what I'd consider "made lives worse".
> one of the most famously abusive OSS maintainers in history
Nice ad hominem by the way. Also bullshit. He was outspoken to the point of being considered rude sometimes, and he was what I would consider abusive in his language on some occasions (like the infamous "abortion" rant; if you never had a bad day and said something regretful, feel free to cast the first stone).
You however make it sounds that he raped a lot of people. Or murdered his wife (hello Hans). Or at least was like this all the time (which he was not, he was mostly polite and professional if maybe a little to direct for some cultural backgrounds).
Get a grip. Some feelings were hurt, some egos got nicked, he crossed the line verbally on a few occasions, got criticized for it, learned from that it seems, some people - which, again, is perfectly fine - decided not to work with him. Linux lost some contributors maybe. In order words: life.
If you expect utter perfection from everybody always, you'll be in for a big surprise.
>Suppose it was a huge deal to other people. I mean, it's not a hypothetical, I've provided citations.
You provided some one-sided hearsay, from mostly anonymous stories, nothing that even amounts to harassment either, let alone sexual harassment. That's the evidential standard of a kangaroo court and the kind of "crime" dictators use to silence their most outspoken dissidents, not due process (which you seem really fond of by mentioning it all the time).
Regardless, that RMS made some people uneasy - while a bit problematic and surely something he could and should have improved - does by far not warrant the way people punch down on him, destroyed his reputation and negated his entire life's work, called him names, fabricated false allegations such as that he was defending Epstein.
Where is your empathy for his humanity and plight? Or is that reserved to people who are slightly irked out and/or offended to see he had a mattress in his office (which he used to sleep on, because he was essentially living in his office, btw)?
>Are the feelings of other people illegitimate when they disagree with you?
Their feeling are legitimate - which by the way does not mean they always have legitimate cause to feel that way, nor does it mean they never have a legitimate cause - but matter a lot less than facts or actions.
> You replied to many top level comments for a period of time the same period of time with almost the same text.
I've reviewed my comments and this is mostly false. Not sure why you felt you needed to put this one in here.
> Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?
"Calling out" does not mean distorting facts to kickstart a rage-fuelled campaign against the company that offers, to this day, the most to the Linux ecosystem, free of charge, freely licensed.
To wit, he is an influencer, I am not, and should be much more careful with how he wields his influence. That was what I have re-iterated, comment by comment.
> For whatever reason, this phenomenon is completely lacking in the open source community. Instead, the opposite seems to occur. OSS developers are actively hostile toward their users, both vocally and how they react to criticism that their software isn't user friendly or respectful of their user's time. Anybody who has spent hours trying to set up a piece of OSS and then made the mistake of asking the developer for help can attest to this.
Not my experience at all. Well sometimes bugs gets closed for no apparent reason etc but I've rarely been shouted at and I think more often than not they try to help.
> It is a pretty nifty idea but like all things made by Canonical it is basically digitized garbage.
> At least those are not made by people with a disdain for error checking.
Every single time there's a topic about Ubuntu or Canonical you seem to go straight into offensive mode. I can tell you use Fedora, but that's not typical of Fedora users and developers and no excuse.
I'm an open source developer and believer, but this kind of behavior slowly burns my soul, even more when it seems accepted. I've worked on enough projects in my life that it's absolutely certain that you use my code regularly. It's inside Go, Python, APT, and RPM by the way (hello Jeff Johnson, wherever you are), and in key libraries that you surely depend on as well. And I never heard you complaining about any of that with such anger here.
I'm also Canonical's CTO, and I was one of the key designers and developers that started snaps, and juju, and other key projects from Canonical. I usually hear such blind hate in silence, but sometimes it's just too much. I don't understand why do we do that to ourselves, as a Linux community. Why is it okay to openly offend unknown people that we almost certainly depend upon? What is it that we came here to do, again?
> This is extremely misleading: Copyleft is about making sure everyone has the same rights.
In theory... except in this case, the point is ensuring that people who don't share his political leanings can't use the product in a way he doesn't like (to generate an AST). It's not even about modifying gcc in this context, he doesn't want people to "misuse" it. It's entirely about telling people what they can and can't do with their software. Where is the freedom in that?
> And here you prove you have no serious argument, by devolving to insults.
I'm calling him a nutcase because he's being paranoid by crippling his own software to prevent a thing that people can already easily do with a competitor (clang). It's not like people are like "oh no gcc can't emit an AST I guess I'll give up and forget the entire venture" they just go "well I guess I'll go use clang instead"
Except that most distros DID distributed it UNALTERED, like Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux.
> There was no debate; the developer of cdrtools was just an asshole [...]
Abusing anonymity to vilify an open source developer who works to give us the best software?
You're a liar and a coward, and you know it.
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