Re: [lug-l] Recent Lennart Poettering Outrage

[Bas Wijnen <bwijnen@xxxxxxx>]

On 10/07/2014 10:03 AM, Charles Cash wrote:
> Hey all.
> 
> I recently read a blog post by Lennart
> <https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2ifo6h/lennart_on_the_linux_community/>
> (creator of PulseAudio and lead dev of SystemD) where he rants about the
> OSS community as a whole, especially that surrounding Linux.  Thus, I
> was wondering how other's experience with this community is.  So I have
> some questions to fuel a debate aimed at getting more insight:

This particular debate is in a constant state of exploding; it really
doesn't need more fuel added to it. :-P

But hey, since you ask, I can give you a Debian-based answer. :-)

I hope I'm not killing the debate with this mail; it turned out a bit
longer than I thought it would.

Anyway, it reminded me of this Q&A session by Linus:
http://www.montanalinux.org/video-torvalds-q-and-a-debconf-portland-2014.html

In particular from 0:15, his argument is pretty much "I have a thick
skin, therefore I may insult you".  I disagree very much with this.  The
robustness principle, "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in
what you accept", is IMO often wrong in a technical context[1], but it
is very right in social contexts.  Being thick-skinned is fine, and it
is useful at times.  But it must never be a requirement for being part
of the community.

[1] This is the reason for the web to be so broken; browsers accept
junk, and designers don't fix things if most browsers (or even just one)
accept it.  If browsers would simply refuse to display a broken page,
they would never leave the developer's machine.

> 1. Have you contributed to OSS?

Yes, I'm a member of Debian, written quite a bit of software and I'm
trying to use only free and open source software on my machines.

> 2. How did a community manager/project manager interact with you
> (positively/negatively)?

Within Debian, in my experience most people are nice and we get along
well.  We do get together for beer at conferences, and I really like the
community.

That said, Debian is extremely open.  As a European, I noticed that this
is the case in the US in general; you guys seem to be afraid to protect
people for fear of hurting the offender's freedom of speech.  An example
is those people harressing students with anti-abortion propaganda on
campus.  In Europe, we would have sent them away: they are opposed to
science; I'm not saying they aren't entitled to their opinion, but there
is no place for it in a scientific institution.  Here the right to be an
idiot[2] is more important than other's right to walk around unhindered.
 I can live with that, but I'm surprised by it.  It doesn't improve the
lives of the people living here, I think.  Knowing that society will
help you when you are harressed makes you feel safe.  Knowing that the
offender will be protected when you complain doesn't.

Anyway, we have the same problem in Debian.  We are very reluctant to
tell people that they are not allowed to say things on our public
mailing lists and bug reports.  There have been important changes
recently, and offenders are now being banned (temporarily or
permanently) from mailing lists.  I think that is a good thing.  It
makes the community a safer place, where people don't have to be afraid
to be insulted.  It can (and will) still happen, but it is more likely
that the offender gets punished, which for the victim is a confirmation
that they weren't doing anything wrong.

[2] In case you disagree that those people are idiots, I'm happy to
discuss this and will try not to insult you (even though of course I
already did).  In fact, I would be very interested to discuss this with
a smart person; I can't really imagine anyone smart believing this sort
of thing, so I would like to learn how this isn't insane. :-)

> 3. Would you be willing to link to a repository/issue tracker where the
> event happened?

While the Debian community is generally a pleasant place to be in my
experience, things change when systemd is involved.  And while Lennart
paints himself as the victim of vicious attackers, I think he and his
community are actually the main reason for this.  Now don't get me
wrong: I disagree with the attackers, and I think they shouldn't do
that.  What I'm saying is that the systemd supporters are attacking
others as well, and quite violently but with fewer swear words.  For
example, the response to criticism or even to bug reports is often "we
do not agree that this is a problem, or it is not in our code; stop
wasting our time!"  That is completely inappropriate, and makes people
upset.  Especially because they first lobbied hard to force their
software onto people's machine's.

Here's an attempt by me to defuse one of those discussions:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/05/msg00345.html

Reading the rest of that thread should give you a decent idea about how
polarized the discussion is.

> 4. After reading this article do you see some of Lennart's concerns or
> do you think they are false?

I'm unable to read it without knowing who writes it.  Systemd is by far
the most aggressive subcommunity I know, and IMO Lennart probably is
responsible for a large part of that.  I haven't had personal contact
with him, but I've heard that his responses are similar to those of
other systemd supporters on our mailing lists.  And as several people
note: systemd may be technically fine, but if the maintainers cannot be
trusted, then they don't want it on their computers.

> RMS Correspondent

Haha, right!  Shouldn't you be lobbying to change our name to GNU/Linux
users group? (Seriously, I would be in favor of such a name change btw.)
 Otherwise you are unable to properly perform your function. ;-)

Thanks,
Bas



--------------------------
You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the MTU Linux/UNIX Users Group e-mail list.  To unsubscribe visit https://lists.mtu.edu/sympa/signoff/lug-l or contact the list owners at lug-l-request@xxxxxxx
--------------------------