"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people, especially those you don&#x27;t agree with.<p>I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would &quot;shame&quot; me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge. Additionally, the founder of Perl Mongers, Brian D Foy, argued with me about the naming of my application framework, and then refused to approve the naming of my module even after other people on the newsgroup discussed it with me and we came to a good resolution. ( which led to the vanishing of &quot;registered&quot; modules on cpan imo )<p>The open source community, at large, is not a happy helpful place, and I have gone through a lot of harassment just contributing my own free open source stuff to the world. Also, I can&#x27;t say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face.<p>I am referencing names of individuals so that people can lookup these events and see the truth in what I&#x27;m saying; NOT to shame these people. They are all good developers, and I value their contributions ( don&#x27;t necessarily like these people but what does that matter ). There should be respect in the community regardless of whether you like or dislike people&#x27;s projects.

Yeah, this was discussed about an hour ago, and it hit the flame filter pretty fast. I&#x27;d suggest that it won&#x27;t last very long on the front page.<p>Incidentally, I find it very sad that we can&#x27;t discuss this on HN. What has happened to Lennart, and the behaviour of Linus Torvalds as a bully, is probably something decent to talk about.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8414859</a>

I&#x27;ll probably get burned for saying this but I think this is related to GamerGate&#x2F;SocialJusticeWarriors. I think that other controversy is being portrayed as anti-feminist (and there is a lot of undertones of that) but I think that it is more indicative of a general problem -- it is basically unrestrained incivility against those whom one has disagreements, or who has done perceived wrongs.<p>For some reason it has become really easy to escalate things quickly from what are disagreements or perceived wrongs to really intense hatred and online forms of retaliation that is so extreme that it overshadows the original disagreements&#x2F;wrongs.<p>It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin&#x27;s law for group arguments, the first one to go full &quot;4chan&quot; (or whatever) on a subject is declared the loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with.<p>This type of crazy retaliation is really harmful to those that are targeted, but it also serves to detract from legitimate arguments. It is just weird.<p>But this is the internet and I suspect it isn&#x27;t really that easy to curb going full &quot;4chan&quot; on subjects because it can be &quot;fun&quot; for those involved because there are few personal consequences -- as per that sociology concept of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deindividuation</a>.

I must be very lucky... because after many many years of writing open source, being involved with at least three communities (IT security with hping, Tcl language with Tcl&#x2F;Jim-Interpreter, Databases with Redis) I still have to receive serious attacks. Actually the only attacks I can remember are about my vision on how diversity should be handled (I was accused of sexism for saying that people are all alike), and a few company-driven attacks 99% generated from the SF area and for people working for competing companies, and with a big overlap of people accusing me of sexism (go figure...). Basically none of this was ever a great deal, and the remaining 99.999% of the OSS community was always awesome. Basically I&#x27;m just a single data point but as somebody involved for a long time in OSS, I can&#x27;t confirm what I read.<p>Well, also consider this: I refuse most pull requests, and I&#x27;m not the kind of guy that is kind at every cost. I also am part of a minority, being <i>very</i> southern-european, from Sicily, often associated with the worst cliché of the Italian culture, Mafia, ... I also have a vision on software development which is very far from what is considered &quot;good practice&quot;. One could expect me to receive more attacks than average.

Lennart specifically called out Gentoo; as a Gentoo user, I do want to speak up in defense of the Gentoo community.<p>I will concede the point that Lennart has, by far, probably received more vitriol per-capita from the Gentoo community than any others. I&#x27;m not going to defend any of the personal attacks launched on him.<p>However, Lennart writes very opinionated software, and the opinions it takes are more at clash with the Gentoo way than the Fedora way or the Ubuntu way. Furthermore it seems to me that Gentoo users are more conservative than any distro other than Slack.<p>What this adds up to is that a far larger fraction of the Gentoo community have issues with Lennart&#x27;s software. There will be some fraction X of people who have issues with his software that will make inappropriate attacks on Lennart himself. Given that a much larger fraction of the Gentoo community has issues with his software than in other communities, the fact he gets a disproportionate amount of vitriol from Gentoo users doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean that X is larger in Gentoo.

So I&#x27;m a blogger with posts that occasionally go semi-viral [1], and I&#x27;ve been subject to unpleasant comments on a few occasions. Here are a couple of posts which have gotten me quite a bit of hate:<p><a href="http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrisstucchio.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;basic_income_vs_basic...</a><p><a href="http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrisstucchio.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;equal_weights.html</a><p>In both cases they are posts about mathematics which use other topics (economics, dating) as concrete examples and the examples draw hatred.<p>However, unlike many of the people subject to unpleasant behavior such as this, I&#x27;m going to suggest that the best thing to do is ignore it and move on with your life. I don&#x27;t favor much in the way of systematic solutions. Assorted &quot;codes of conduct&quot; being proposed are blunt instruments and are easily used by people in power to bully others or to shut down discussion of &quot;incorrect&quot; opinions.<p>Furthermore, technology is fairly unique in it&#x27;s communication. In many fields, communication is there to create a sense of community and in-group status - creating a tribe. In our field, most communication is simply about facts. It&#x27;s quite easy to ignore &quot;you&#x27;re wrong because X,Y,Z <i>and a big jerk</i>&quot; - just evaluate argument X,Y,Z and update your beliefs accordingly.<p>Back when I lived in NY, a coach told me (rough paraphrase): &quot;Tu debil. Necesita para construir tu corpu.&quot; (&quot;You&#x27;re weak. You need to build your body.&quot;) In the recent past, the tech world&#x27;s culture was a lot like that of a mexican boxing club. The correct response is &quot;si, mi SQL debil, eu pratico.&quot; (&quot;Yes, my SQL is weak, I&#x27;ll practice.&quot;)<p>Somewhere along the line, we gave this up and became a culture where feelings matter more than results. I think the solution here is for the tech world to regrow the thick skin it once had.<p>[1] A post about functional programming is limited in it&#x27;s eventual virality.

&gt; in particular ones where losing face is a major issue<p>This touches an interesting point. Feedback must be accurate. If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are &quot;not right&quot;. Losing face is a fact of life. When I&#x27;m wrong, I want to know I am wrong, what I am wrong about and just how wrong am I. If possible, tell me what can I do to be right the next time.<p>It must also be kind. You do not point someone is wrong to humiliate the person and you should take care not to (I try and I fail more often than I&#x27;d like to) fall into the trap of judging a person for his or her first efforts.<p>Having said that, I am almost sure all the exaggerated discourse on the Linux kernel mailing list is not really part of the message, but should be understood as more like a sport, a game, where the one with the most elaborately crafted insult wins. When Linus says you should be retroactively aborted he most likely wants to say you are very wrong and your idea is really bad and that, maybe, you should be more thorough the next time you submit a patch. Their time is a finite resource.<p>Is this the most efficient way to run the community? Probably not. We just don&#x27;t know what is the most efficient way to do it and it can just be that Linus found a local maximum.

Open source is not awful. It&#x27;s perhaps the most important thing to happen to computing, ever. Multi-billion dollar companies have formed largely around open source. It enables millions of people to do business. Learning how to code is easier than ever.<p>Saying open source is awful because you&#x27;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...<p>Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good. Well, a little more than that, but that&#x27;s the basic gist.<p>I&#x27;ve personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS. The few times I&#x27;ve found a bug I sent a bug report, the maintainer was super friendly (maybe because I wasn&#x27;t a whiny douche-bag complaining about something that I got for free), and fixed it in an absurdly short amount of time (less than a day). Even if it wasn&#x27;t fixed for a month I&#x27;d have been more than happy.<p>Anyhow, the open source community is much like the world at large. Many very nice, friendly people, and a few assholes. Same thing if you step outside. It&#x27;s best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your interactions, but rather as a sharing philosophy in the same way free markets are an economic philosophy.

He&#x27;s just the new Drepper.<p>Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole.<p>Honestly, it&#x27;s people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git is the more important contribution, because as it stands Linux as a potential platform for end user deployment, except as part of Android or Chrome OS, is basically dead now.

I agree somewhat with Lennart. The Libre&#x2F;OSS community is full of egotistical asshats -- generally western and in their 30s and 40s. What&#x27;s funny, though, is that not all camps in the community are that bad. The Linux camp has deteriorated in recent years -- I&#x27;ve noticed it myself on several occasions. The BSD camps don&#x27;t suffer near as much from the nonsense that occurs on the Linux side. I think there are several reasons for this. One I have notice in person working on both sides is that the BSD crews tend to be more professional overall. They love UNIX and the goal has always been to create the best UNIX-like OS around. The BSD license is arguably better IMO as well. Quite a few Linux devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and tend to be vocal closed-source opponents for the sake of being vocal. The world cannot be all closed source or all open source. There is room for everyone. Most of the issues with people I have had over the three decades I&#x27;ve been in IT have been with Linux-based devs and users. Without exception all BSD guys and girls have been the pinnacle of professionalism. I think this speaks volumes and is quite telling. This is not observation from one workplace -- this is over many, many years in different work spaces, different cultures, states, whatnot.<p>All things considered, I have been seriously thinking of moving my core infrastructure over to FreeBSD&#x2F;OpenBSD to avoid the coming (well, here already) continued balkanisation of Linux. The code quality of Linux has deteriorated of late as well. I&#x27;ve noticed it. My BSD test boxes running the same software suffer nary a hitch. Debian seems to be sane still, as does Slackware, but for how long. This ridiculous systemd battle is bonkers.

He calls Linus out for being a toxic element in the open source (or at least Linux) ecosystem. This is quite probably true.<p>Trying to look at it from the other side, though, I wonder if Linus got to be the way he is because it&#x27;s how he copes with the toxic effluvia he has to deal with on a regular basis. Surely Torvalds has to deal with even more of this than Poettering does. If these things were directed at me on a regular basis, I can&#x27;t claim with confidence that my moral fortitude would be up to the task of remaining easy to work with either.

For all its flaws I must credit the various open source codes I&#x27;ve come to study along the years for all I know in CS. Long term, it&#x27;s more important than degrees and schools.<p>For instance I vividly remember how hard for me it was to learn and code in Objective-C for iOS back in 2009, at this time there was only few related open source projects available to study and learn how good UI were implemented and such, it was mostly a closed source world.<p>Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled Rust developpers so far. I can&#x27;t fathom how painful it must be for current Swift developers to develop in a young (so far) closed project where you can&#x27;t see nothing and bang your head against every walls to find your way.

This doesn&#x27;t pertain to &quot;<i>Open Source</i>&quot; in general, the same argument can be said about companies and closed-source products, which can be just as well run by jerks. I have a couple of small projects published on GitHub and the people that interacted with me have been very professional and thankful for my work. I am also a part of big open-source communities which are very professional and asshole behavior is definitely an exception and is being punished in general.<p>A comment like &quot;<i>How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?</i>&quot; is only tolerated if you&#x27;re Linus Torvalds or somebody like him that has contributed a lot and that is tolerated in spite of his character. And yes, the world is full of jerks that want to copy Linus Torvalds, or Theo de Raadt, or Richard Stallman, or Steve Jobs, or David Heinemeier Hansson, or whatever else ruthless leader with strong opinions that happened in this industry, but without the track record to back up their strong thoughts. Open Source is only special because the discussions are often public for anybody to see.<p>I do find Linus&#x27; behavior regrettable, as he&#x27;s a very public person in this industry, his opinions do have legs and he is a role model for others. And I&#x27;m personally against PC talk, for example I think usage of the word &quot;fuck&quot; is totally legitimate because it implies passion, it implies that you care, but I think critiques should never be ad-hominem and people breaking this rule should get social punishment, including Linus.

It&#x27;s easy to see that in some quarters this is certainly true. People are allowed —even encouraged— to smack people down if they&#x27;re being ridiculous... But this isn&#x27;t the rule.<p><a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ubuntu.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;about-ubuntu&#x2F;conduct</a><p>As an Ubuntu member, I&#x27;m expected to behave. In our derivative communities, we try to ensure that people adhere to these principles too. Ask Ubuntu (part of Stack Exchange, not Canonical), for example, also requires people to adhere to the Ubuntu CoC. Ubuntu Forums and IRC have similar behaviour guidelines.<p>Does that mean it&#x27;s always civil? Of course not... But it does mean that nobody&#x27;s surprised when people are tossed out for being needlessly rude and the non-technical flame wars of the late 90s just don&#x27;t happen.

Re: &quot;the Open Source community is full of assholes&quot;<p>s&#x2F;Open Source community&#x2F;human race&#x2F;<p>Also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre&#x27;s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sayre&#x27;s_law</a>

&gt; By many he [Linus] is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one.<p>I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux.<p>It is not a positive characteristic. I wish he wasn&#x27;t as abrasive but that is his personality.<p>What I feel Poettering is doing here is a bit of a &quot;well on technical merits Linus was right but I&#x27;ll attack his abrasiveness instead&quot;. I suspect this is related to the &#x27;debug&#x27; flag and Linus chewing out one of the systemd developers. I think Linus was justified in chewing him out. Maybe shouldn&#x27;t have used expletives, but still justified. And I understand it was a pattern of behavior of leaving bugs in their wake and so on.<p>&gt; If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of this behaviour.<p>Hard to say. Maybe so. Maybe if he wouldn&#x27;t be as critical and as abrasive we would have had a different OS or different community. Maybe better. Maybe worse. hard to say.

As a data point and a side note: I&#x27;ve been participating in open source discussions for more than 15 years now. This issue seems to come up more and more, and it seems that many communities are deteriorating. Lennart is right about Linus setting a bad example.<p>But not all is gloomy. As a positive example, the Clojure community has always impressed me with its maturity. People are incredibly nice and helpful, discussions are constructive. Bad tone is immediately struck down. And it is true that a lot depends on the leader — Rich Hickey sets the example here and people follow.

I certainly agree that there some Open source projects that are extremely toxic, like the Linux Kernal, but I wish people wouldn&#x27;t say all open source is that way. The author has been through a lot of crazy shit for very silly reasons, note I&#x27;m not blaming him in any way - no one should go through that over volunteering free work. But I&#x27;ve contributed to Django, Flask, Python, Meotor, and Node.js in different ways and though it&#x27;s varied in how pleasant the experience has been for the most part these communities were really awesome, when dealing with the core teams. I think those are good examples of better open source communities and I think they will tend to pick up more developers that aren&#x27;t willing to put up with all of the crap involved in the Linux project.

I don&#x27;t think it is fair to generalize this to all of Open Source. The Linux kernel and the Systemd controversy in particular do not represent all of Open Source. That said, I do think Lennart has very valid and important points about the Linux kernel and the Linux community and specifically the Systemd controversy. It&#x27;s too bad.<p>But switching to Mac OS doesn&#x27;t fix this, if we wanted to talk about that then there is a whole set of separate issues there.

I&#x27;m glad Lennart wrote this, though obviously I&#x27;m sorry he had to do it.<p>I&#x27;d like to think this would open up a bigger dialog about the truly decrepit level of discourse that is common on all too many OSS projects (not all, of course, but many of them, and oftentimes, the older, the more nasty), but I&#x27;m not that idealistic.<p>I don&#x27;t think anyone, least of all Lennart, would say that his projects (particularly PulseAudio and systemd) aren&#x27;t up for criticism or discussion, but what has happened to him has gone beyond criticism and into just nasty territory.<p>But here&#x27;s my question:<p>With so much of OSS being funded by large corporations (often through these corps sponsoring employees to work on stuff full time), when do we finally drop the &quot;it&#x27;s all volunteers so this shit is acceptable&quot; mantra.<p>It&#x27;s not all volunteers. It&#x27;s people volunteering their time and collectively sharing the source&#x2F;combining efforts, but make no mistake, OSS is a huge enterprise and is primarily funded by the Fortune 500. I cannot imagine that the discourse that happens in some of these mailing lists and forums would be allowed to exist without consequence if they were happening on an official company listserv. I cannot imagine that Red Hat or IBM or whoever would let this go on on their official channels without HR getting involved.<p>So why is it acceptable and passed off on the &quot;outer&quot; channels?<p>Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It&#x27;s the status quo. Time for the whole movement to grow up and be accountable to treating people like human beings.

This reminded me of the &quot;This is Phil Fish: A case study in internet celebrity&quot; video:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w</a><p>Phil Fish is an indie game developer, internet-famous for the game Fez. And &quot;everybody&quot; hates him. Though as the video explains, it&#x27;s more complicated than that.<p>The video is notably also as being referenced by Notch (creator of Minecraft) as part of the reason why he decided to go into semi-retirement after the sale of Mojang.

I&#x27;m not sure how this pertains to Open Source communities across the board..? Seems to be a pretty targeted indictment of the Linux dev community. There are plenty that don&#x27;t stand for the type of bad acting described here.

I sometime think whether some people, especially people like Lennart did not experience bullying at school and would prefer the internet be policed to prevent any &quot;attacks&quot; made towards them.<p>Sometimes you just need to take it on the chin and carry on.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m from the UK and you just expect the the world to shit on you whenever possible, I&#x27;m not really affected by outright attacks and offensiveness, but I probably wouldn&#x27;t let anyone get to me, like Lennart shows.

The whole post is just a weak assertion. Linus does run a really large project with many, sometimes random, contributors quite efficiently and it&#x27;s not possible to tell whether it&#x27;s because, despite, or regardless of his style with a sample of one.<p>I&#x27;m also reasonably sure that Lennart Poettering&#x27;s experience does not generalize. He is rather unique within the Linux community.

A psychologist friend mentioned that invoking 2nd person (you) often escalates conflict. I wonder what it would take to write a thread parser that bounces comments with &quot;you&quot; as the focal point?<p>Sentiment analysis probably has some utility if bad commits are clustered around a particular contributor. Would it be more product to represent sentiment as a graph? What would it look like?

Some people are attributing this phenomenon to the internet, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s accurate. I studied Russian history in college and the writings of various members of the communist intelligentsia had the same vitriol. Particularly the writings between Lenin and Karl Kautsky. My professors called it &quot;maximalism&quot;, a term that hasn&#x27;t caught on in general use. It&#x27;s meaning is the belief that anyone that disagrees with you even in small ways, disagrees with you fully. I think this attitude is what occurs in OS communities, where people who generally agree find themselves in angry exchanges.

Maybe these strong reactions from core linux engineers have meaning. Maybe strong reactions from large parts of the user base have meaning.<p>Maybe one reaps what one sows.

This post would be interesting if there wasn&#x27;t the “all others do it except us” accusation. Systemd zealots are exactly the same with any other open source community&#x27;s zealots and systemd&#x27;s diva devs are exactly the same with any other open source diva devs.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Management_by_perkele</a><p>Linus&#x27;s approach is a cultural thing.

POETTERING EFFECT - It appears that lately some Linux developers are concentrating on changing things (that work fine) with no particular reason, breaking existing functionality in the process and running away before the job is really finished (sometimes called the Poettering effect), while in fact it would be better to make a nicely polished finished system that can be used from installation without having to tune it up.

never cared who is behind a nick on the other side of the cable, if he is white,black,yellow,green or pink. But i like the banter and sometimes people are cursing at others not because of gender, race or any other factor but because of emotions. If PC will get over everything soon it will be not acceptable to say anything. Is this the internet we all fought for ? In internet it doesn&#x27;t matter who you are.

For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other.<p>In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated to some degree. Online, in a domain where technical merit is king, however, things tend to remain more dysfunctional than in real life. Some open source groups make an effort to curate their communities and shun this behavior (for example the SVN devs wrote about intentionally doing this on mailing lists IIRC). I imagine some groups are not quite so organized, however, especially very large groups.<p>I think Lennart&#x27;s experience favors this anecdotal theory: The more technical communities (Gentoo is given an example - and you have to be more comfortable getting your hands dirty to run Gentoo than to run a distro like Ubuntu or Fedora) empirically appear to be more dysfunctional.<p>I actually avoid going to technical conferences anymore since this dysfunction and awkwardness is always intense and tiring&#x2F;difficult to deal with. I&#x27;m not exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a large number of social situations by friends&#x2F;family growing up since I have always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself.<p>This doesn&#x27;t only affect us, by the way. When I was young I worked several blue-collar jobs (construction) and it was a very dysfunctional boys-club type social environment as well, but in a different way.<p>I love what I do, but there&#x27;s a lot of weirdos here. I try not to be one. :)<p>EDIT: Removed ignorant aspergers comment.

Odd, I&#x27;ve never had a problem from the open source projects I&#x27;ve developed or contributed too. In fact, I&#x27;ve made more friends from it than enemies.<p>I suppose the pressure of these projects is small compared to something important like a driver or operating system... but perhaps that says more about people than open source.

I think this very much depends on your own attitude. Sure, there are assholes who will say things about how useless is your project and how they hate you for it, but this is not the norm in open source. And it&#x27;s definitely not the norm when it comes to developers, not users. I have worked with various people in open source, including some that are known to be &quot;not good at dealing with people&quot;, but I never had a serious problem with them.<p>In fact, just a few weeks ago I had a wonderful experience contributing a patch to cairo. You meet a new person and you are working together with the goal of the best quality code. I was not doing much open source development for some time and it was amazing how great it felt again.

I actually see that language as creative and funny, don&#x27;t say because I&#x27;m not the target audience. I forgot the comedian who said that he likes to cross the line then come back to bring some people with him.<p>I appreciate the work that is being done in open source community, the language part I don&#x27;t really care much as long as it&#x27;s to make a point. If you don&#x27;t like that community, why don&#x27;t you just fork the kernel and call it whatever you like. Nobody prevents you from doing that then you become the jail keeper and show what you can do to the world.

Conflating the Open Source community at large with the Linux community, the Linux development community, and the Linux kernel development community does not help him make his case.

&gt; I don&#x27;t usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of assholes, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple &quot;petitions&quot; on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a &quot;song&quot; on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks. On IRC, people &#x2F;msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there&#x27;s more. A lot more.<p>My jaw dropped. Feelings about systemd aside (I actually quite like it), this is uncalled for, and outrageously bad.<p>Grow up! Hiring a hitman? Are you for real?<p>Anytime someone makes a large project that gets traction, people are going to disagree; that does not make it acceptable to launch personal attacks, and call for violence against the developer.<p>As a community, we need to call out the people doing this and show it&#x27;s not acceptable; irregardless of any politics that may be involved.

The problem with many self-organized groups of engineers is that they equate meritocracy with technical contributions.<p>This is a very, very limited way of approaching the complex dynamics of people working together. It shows up in many ways. Most open source communities are not good places for people who can contribute design, documentation and god forbid, people <i>management</i> skills.<p>A pervasive illusion amongst software engineers is that we can do without &quot;soft&quot; skills, and nowhere does this manifests itself more in places where no boss or company forcefully adds those soft skills into the mix.<p>Some open source communities are lucky enough to have people that have both the technical chops to get respect based on technically focused meritocratic values and have other &quot;management&quot; skills. Most don&#x27;t. So once conflict arises (as it inevitably will, because they are human beings) and simple meritocracy no longer suffices (because both sides are smart and contribute), the community either breaks up or devolves into a permanent Lord of the Flies atmosphere.<p>It has nothing to do with Open Source in general. It&#x27;s the lack of value placed on soft skills in tech driven meritocracies.<p>(You can see the same thing in tech start-ups founded by technies, but there it usually gets quickly corrected after the first PR disaster.)

The author of this g+ post is the author of &quot;systemd&quot;, a controversial new program being installed by default into some of the most popular distributions of the GNU&#x2F;Linux operating system.<p>It seems that some Linux users are unhappy with systemd.<p>While I do not agree with any user being disrespectful to the author by targeting him personally, the fact that users are seriously upset about systemd as a program gives me hope for the future of the popular Linux distributions.<p>When the author says &quot;Open Source is awful&quot; maybe he is revealing his true colors. Perhaps he is better suited to closed source development which is insulated from public review by users and other developers at-large. But that is for him to decide.<p>There was a post on HN a little while back by the developer of a popular glibc alernative for Linux who told us he has been using a flat, linear &#x2F;etc&#x2F;rc file for over a decade and his boot times are substantially shorter than with systemd. But more importantly, his approach is simple by comparison. How many users will be able to debug systemd by examining the internals?<p>It is this type of &quot;hands-on&quot; user that gives me hope for the future of the distributions that are experimenting with systemd. I hope these users will speak up if they have not done so already.

The Linux kernal dev community is a community of rough tough programmer bastards. If you can&#x27;t handle the knocks there, maybe that&#x27;s not the community for you? I&#x27;m sure there are other less abrasive communities you can join? It certainly says a lot about someone who believes that they are entitled to join a community and to demand to have their voice heard and to have the community adapt to their wants and desires. I believe that sort of influence is earned within a community.<p>I mean, I wouldn&#x27;t join &#x2F;r&#x2F;kkk and expect everyone to &quot;chill out on the use of the N word guys&quot;. Maybe, just maybe, I&#x27;m not as important to that community as I believe myself to be?<p>Urgh, I can&#x27;t believe I&#x27;m typing this, but the phrase &quot;be the change you want to see&quot; applies for community membership. Be the beacon of conduct you want the community to share. Inspire the community to aim for those ideals through example.<p>Or write a snarky blog post about it because you&#x27;re finding it difficult to get mind share on an obviously flawed project.

Re this part, about Linus Torvalds being aggressive and insulting to his contributors:<p><pre><code> But no, it&#x27;s not an efficient way to run a community. If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of this behaviour. </code></pre> You have to have been utterly brilliant to invent git. I don&#x27;t know enough about operating system internals to say if the same is true for Linux, but I know enough about git to say it&#x27;s true for git.<p>So Linus was brilliant enough to invent git, and is widely known to be a complete asshole to his contributors.<p>He rarely brags about being a genius - in fact I believe I&#x27;ve seen him on video making modest statements about being overrated and not really that smart - but he often argues that being an asshole to his contributors is a wise and effective form of management.<p>To me, he seems like an epoch-definingly great hacker who nonetheless has absolutely no clue what his own strengths and weaknesses are.

Huge egos and insults are things that have always bothered me in the OSS community. Just some days ago the Crockford vs. fat thread on github resurfaced and shocked a lot of people on HN [0]. It certainly has stopped from releasing stuff in the past. Lately, though, I&#x27;ve been having an awesome experience with a few of my really simple open source projects. I&#x27;ve been receiving a few emails with requests in the most polite way possible, some of them even thanking me for my small contribution. Recently I&#x27;ve even got a pull request from a guy who out of the blue designed an icon for my android app. These things are priceless to me, and certainly motivate me much more than the bad parts demotivate me.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5135512" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;twbs&#x2F;bootstrap&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3057#issuecomment-5...</a>

This article reminded me of what Valerie Aurora[1] posted &amp; discussed. She called for feminism values, and Lennart is calling for less hate. I get the feeling they are both talking of the same underlying problem.<p>On a personal note, when GIMP 2.6 first came out, I filled a bug report pointing to the devs that under Windows XP sans SP2, the program would crash on load. Instead of getting a real answer, I got some angry comments about not updating my OS and a ban from the bug tracking system. Some time later, they added Windows XP SP2 as a requirement. I still use GIMP, but whenever I find a bug, I just wait patiently until the next version to see if they have fixed it.<p>[1] HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8414180</a><p>Edit: found the bug report, it was SP2, not SP1 as I first thought. Also fixed some typos.

Ehh, you just have to look past the arguments and inane people. I run a small-to-medium open source project (the Min CSS framework, <a href="http://mincss.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mincss.com</a>) and I get plenty of inane comments, criticism, and personal attacks. However, I also get plenty of nice comments that make it all worthwile. For a project as large as systemd, I imagine that this is many orders of magnitude more extreme.<p>As with any group of people, the assholes are the loudest, and if you&#x27;re writing software for a huge group of people a bunch of them are going to be really loud assholes.

Welcome to the Internet? Hack with people irl and this happens way less often.

This coming from the man who, when people point out flaws in his design of systemd, says basically &quot;too bad, I&#x27;m doing it anyway, and if you don&#x27;t like it, you can take a hike.&quot;

I think people might be overthinking the problem here. Whenever someone is really good at one thing (say, programming), it is easy for them to get away with being really bad at others (say, manners).<p>It&#x27;s the same reason college athletes get away with breaking so many rules.<p>And both situations are very hard to solve due to the competing and conflicting interests involved.<p>On a personal level, we should all try our best to stop people (ourselves included) from being programmer bullies. And I&#x27;ve seen many people work very hard to do so!

Never had to participate in linux kernel development, so can&#x27;t really comment on it (although I hear Linus can be rude).<p>But open source != linux kernel. There are so many small, large, medium project, that if you really want to - you can find where to contribute. It works the best when you actually need to fix something you use and you have developer expertise to fix it. But even when you can describe in details bug or feature - this is often is very welcomed by project maintainers.

Hehe, around the line about the community being mainly about white males in their 30&#x27;s and 40&#x27;s, I for some reason felt that the Hitler card was coming :P

This is a duplicate of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8414859</a>

The Open Source community is young, like the rest of the field of software engineering, and we&#x27;re still childish and uncivil towards one another, derived from a root of individualism, fed by the promise of a vast and plentiful uncharted territory.<p>Eventually we will install a system that will protect ourselves from one another. I hope it&#x27;s a good one.<p>On a more specific note, PulseAudio sucks and I could care less what Lennart thinks.

Desktop&#x2F;non-mobile link: <a href="https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/J2TZrTvu7vd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly&#x2F;post...</a><p>It&#x27;s apparently impossible to go back to the desktop version from the mobile page. The &quot;View Desktop&quot; link in the footer takes you to the G+ homepage. Well done, Google.

Maybe video should replace written text in some of these exchanges. I think that someone having to record themselves would make them think twice and maybe rephrase some heinous language. Written word also has the disadvantage of not conveying non-verbal body language and can also be misinterpreted. Not sure this solution would be widely accepted though, unfortunately.

It&#x27;s a shame that ones personal experiences result in generalizations that are then attached to Open Source. People can and will be assholes in any kind of project or group. That has not got a lot to do with Open Source. It would be fairer to say: &quot;I had many bad experiences with the Open Source communities I was involved with&quot;.

I&#x27;ve had some arguments with people but in large part it is pleasant to work with most people in the open source world. I was just at JavaOne and &quot;everybody meets at conferences for beers&quot; really does happen. For smaller projects most developers are extremely happy when someone takes any interest in their project.

Non Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this. You have said nothing.

Can someone here clue me in about why mailing lists still appear to be the de-facto platform for communication for a lot of open source projects - particularly those that are centered around kernel development and other low level &quot;stuff&quot;?

discussion about petition on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3385276" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3385276</a>

Previous discussion with a less flame-bait title:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8414859</a>

I just want to point out that there needs to be a more clear distinction between &quot;open source&quot; and FOSS &quot;Free open source software&quot;. They are two very different things, and I have found that while there are fundamental issues rearing their ugly head in the development model (many eye&#x27;s theory is on it&#x27;s last leg, which is why I push the reduced code theory, which is just my made up theory), much of the vitriol happens in the &quot;open source&quot; community and less so in the FOSS community.<p>The title is a bad on because it lacks this distinction.

The thing that is awful about &quot;Open Source&quot; is that it was a term coined by Eric S Raymond in order to attack Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and to make a name and money for himself as a so-called &quot;hacker&quot;, without actually having to write any useful code, or even read anybody else&#x27;s code and report bugs with his very own &quot;millions of I&#x27;s&quot;.<p>If you want to see how the Open Source fish rots from the head down, you have to look no further than Eric Raymond&#x27;s own blog: &quot;In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.&quot; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;esr.ibiblio.org&#x2F;?p=129</a><p>Or in his own words: &quot;And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.&quot; <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20090628025127&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nedanet...</a><p>&quot;When I hear the words &quot;social responsibility&quot;, I want to reach for my gun.&quot; When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikiquote.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eric_S._Raymond</a><p>&quot;Ego is for little people&quot; &quot;[bla bla bla...] I’ve blown up the software industry once, reinvented the hacker culture twice, and am without doubt one of the dozen most famous geeks alive. Investment bankers pay me $300 an hour to yak at them because I have a track record as a shrewd business analyst. I don’t even have a BS, yet there’s been an entire academic cottage industry devoted to writing exegeses of my work. I could do nothing but speaking tours for the rest of my life and still be overbooked. [...bla bla bla]&quot; (...and on and on ad nausium -- he really needs to work on his BS!) <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;esr.ibiblio.org&#x2F;?p=1404</a><p>The hacker culture can do just fine without ESR&#x27;s &quot;reinventions&quot;, thank you. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728146" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7728146</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727953" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7727953</a>

Poettering&#x27;s M.O. is basically to force people to adopt changes that piss off a lot of people, and then whine when he doesn&#x27;t get his way or he gets push back by standards boards who aren&#x27;t interested in his personal agenda. Keep flouncing, Lennart. I&#x27;m sure this is the best way to get people to be nice to you or adopt your changes.

+1. But then, is it necessary? Jobs and Gates were not exactly moderate, as far as we know.

Communities with corporate stewards are a lot more civil for obvious reasons

Seriously why would you work on open source if the community is that bad. It&#x27;s not open source in general though. Some projects are great fun to work on. Just change which project you&#x27;re working on.

This trend towards using victim status from trolls as a shield to ignore real criticism is really unfortunate. Linus&#x27;s criticism of redhat and redhat employees is perfectly reasonable and valid. Trying to distract attention from it and pretend he is just some evil bully nobody should listen to is incredibly childish and counter productive.

<p><pre><code> The Linux community is dominated by western, white, straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days. </code></pre> Could it be that this is a purely cultural thing? If the fish rots from the head, then isn&#x27;t something about the culture to be blame? Outside of race but purely from a group of straight males who are probably sexually repressed, beta male, grew up in a individualistic society free to express oneself naturally give rise to such Spartan environment?<p>Imagine if the linux community consisted mostly of Korean or Japanese males, both countries with strong Neo-confucian values of social hierarchy and mutual respect, avoiding harsh words. But maybe such culture are not apt at producing new ideas but retaining old ones.

More info that points to what caused all the hate - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lennart_Poettering</a>

I read this article and was very confused about how somebody could create an open source project that lead to actual death threads. Then I googled Lennart Poettering and it all made sense. PulseAudio and systemd make for a particularly wretched resume: Poettering is probably responsible for more frustration to Linux users than anybody else right now. Not that I&#x27;m not going to condone online harassment or blame the victim, but I am a little happy that this harassment is based on technical merits instead of appearance or sexual orientation as is normally the case.

Fourteen year old kids were telling me that they were going to skullfuck my grandmother with a rake over Xbox Live, a decade ago, just because I killed them once or twice in Halo 2. Internet insults have always been ridiculously over the top, it&#x27;s nothing new. Nobody is actually going to rape or kill her over this, you&#x27;re a massive idiot if you think for even a split second that they would.

Anything is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this.

If it is so bad, do not use it!<p>One could always pay $1000&#x2F;hour and get his software from someone with correct attitude, sex, race and age. If you pay $0 do not complain!

Systemd and PulseAudio are getting pushed down everybody&#x27;s throat, unasked for. They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy.<p>Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package&#x2F;rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to infect nearly all distributions with systemd.<p>And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought. It&#x27;s a task, work where their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any other term you think applies! That&#x27;s what is wrong with people, we are all a bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by choosing the life of suffering. It&#x27;s in our nature.<p>Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a product as i don&#x27;t want to use another insulting term, as the author apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post as he did, if you DO NOT care).<p>If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need address so much bitching about your &#x27;stuff&#x27; and still feel like stuffing it down everybody&#x27;s throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY?<p>Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared and or opposed by many, deal with it.