The open source community is “quite a sick place to be in,” Red Hat engineer and Systemd developer Lennart Poettering said Monday in a post on Google+. “The open source community is full of [assh*les], and I probably more than most others am one of their most favorite targets,” Poettering added. “I get hate mail for hacking on open source. People have started multiple ‘petitions’ …. asking me to stop working. Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!).”
There is a reason why Poettering gets so much hate - systemd is a step in the wrong direction. It is bloated (50,000 lines of C code against the 6,000 of System V INIT), it does way too much for an init system (against the unix philosophy, do one thing and do it good), it's not POSIX (meaning no portability) and contains a number of hard-coded features (such as communicating with Plymouth, Red Hat's splash screen manager).
What is more (and against the unix way of doing things) it's mandatory dependencies make it impossible to eg. install GNOME > 3.8 with some other init system, therefore taking away the linux user's possibility to choose.
Last but not least, Poettering displayed many times an "it's my way or f*** off" attitude, which in turn creates even more animosity against him.
What "privacy issue" would that be? the fact that you get to test out Windows 10 on your hardware for free and in return they get to see what works, what don't, and what UI parts people use the most? Oh and all of which is spelled out in the EULA in B&W before you ever install it?
If you haven't tried windows 10 you really should, its gonna make the Linux advocates cry in their Bash prompts. Its fast, runs great on even weak hardware (I have it running on a 2009 AMD netbook and I'd say its a good 30% faster than Win 7 and that is with nearly every driver running in compatibility mode...oh and for those that poo poo a stable kernel ABI? ALL THE DRIVERS WORK OOTB and I even have full hardware acceleration! Just try using 5 year old drivers in Linux and see how far you get!) and the few UI changes from Win 7 are for the better like the consolidated notifications.
So if you haven't give it a spin you really should, its shaping up to be the new Win 7! Oh and for those (like me) that missed their Windows 7 gadgets? Pick up gadget8, its free, comes with the most popular gadgets like CPUMon and it runs any gadget that runs on Win 7...its great!
This isn't a FOSS issue - although we'd all like to think the FOSS community is something special, and an exception to certain rules. This is an internet wide phenomenon. When you think who has the most time to spend on the internet, it's typically those suffering from mental illness, the unemployed, and unemployable - generally unhappy people. And the internet gives them anonymity and bullying a sense of power.
The only solution I know of is to put the trolls on ignore, and if you feel your safety is threatened, call the police. At least in the Western world police and governments are becoming more aware of the seriousness of cyber crimes such as serious harassment and bullying. But unfortunately when it comes to developing software, a thick hide is essential. You can't take trolling personally, if you do, you've ceded a certain amount of your own personal power to them...
The Linux community is unfriendly? No!
It's taken 10 years for me to go to Linux on the desktop because in the past, the opinion of the Linux community toward a new user was, "How dare you install Linux without already knowing how it works!" Not to mention that the GUI was apparently only to have a nice background picture because everything was done with the terminal window.
That has thankfully changed. Thank goodness because I really couldn't stand Windows anymore as of Windows 8. In addition to normal issues, there are the privacy issues of newer Windows OSs, and Windows 10 is looking to be a real beauty there. I just can't go there anymore and I'm not going to ditch my computers just so I can use the Apple OS of which I'm not a big fan anyway. Because I have used it for those who want to know.
There may be some lingering nastiness in the developer world but things have come a long way for the end user. Linux may take over the desktop yet.
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Systemd Dev Slams FOSS Culture
Posted by: Katherine Noyes October 7, 2014 07:46 PMThe open source community is “quite a sick place to be in,” Red Hat engineer and Systemd developer Lennart Poettering said Monday in a post on Google+. “The open source community is full of [assh*les], and I probably more than most others am one of their most favorite targets,” Poettering added. “I get hate mail for hacking on open source. People have started multiple ‘petitions’ …. asking me to stop working. Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!).”
What is more (and against the unix way of doing things) it's mandatory dependencies make it impossible to eg. install GNOME > 3.8 with some other init system, therefore taking away the linux user's possibility to choose.
Last but not least, Poettering displayed many times an "it's my way or f*** off" attitude, which in turn creates even more animosity against him.
If you haven't tried windows 10 you really should, its gonna make the Linux advocates cry in their Bash prompts. Its fast, runs great on even weak hardware (I have it running on a 2009 AMD netbook and I'd say its a good 30% faster than Win 7 and that is with nearly every driver running in compatibility mode...oh and for those that poo poo a stable kernel ABI? ALL THE DRIVERS WORK OOTB and I even have full hardware acceleration! Just try using 5 year old drivers in Linux and see how far you get!) and the few UI changes from Win 7 are for the better like the consolidated notifications.
So if you haven't give it a spin you really should, its shaping up to be the new Win 7! Oh and for those (like me) that missed their Windows 7 gadgets? Pick up gadget8, its free, comes with the most popular gadgets like CPUMon and it runs any gadget that runs on Win 7...its great!
The only solution I know of is to put the trolls on ignore, and if you feel your safety is threatened, call the police. At least in the Western world police and governments are becoming more aware of the seriousness of cyber crimes such as serious harassment and bullying. But unfortunately when it comes to developing software, a thick hide is essential. You can't take trolling personally, if you do, you've ceded a certain amount of your own personal power to them...
It's taken 10 years for me to go to Linux on the desktop because in the past, the opinion of the Linux community toward a new user was, "How dare you install Linux without already knowing how it works!" Not to mention that the GUI was apparently only to have a nice background picture because everything was done with the terminal window.
That has thankfully changed. Thank goodness because I really couldn't stand Windows anymore as of Windows 8. In addition to normal issues, there are the privacy issues of newer Windows OSs, and Windows 10 is looking to be a real beauty there. I just can't go there anymore and I'm not going to ditch my computers just so I can use the Apple OS of which I'm not a big fan anyway. Because I have used it for those who want to know.
There may be some lingering nastiness in the developer world but things have come a long way for the end user. Linux may take over the desktop yet.