The personal attacks on Poettering should be directed to Red Hat instead, who actually have the power to do something about it.
I don't think you quite understand the relationship Red Hat has with its employees ("associates" in company lingo but I abhor such doublespeak). Allowing those employees to act and speak independently is kind of a core value. That freedom is only curtailed when it directly impacts paying customers to the extent that it would be considered a breach of that relationship. Upstream, in the open-source community, almost anything goes. Yes, that means systemd developers can be a bit priggish. It also means other developers, also employed by Red Hat, can call them out for it. It's the only way to ensure the diversity and meritocracy that are essential to innovation. Otherwise, you end up not being able to trust a word that employees of a company say because you know they'd never dare say anything even slightly inconsistent with the party line. I used to see that when I worked at EMC, just for example, and it's really quite stifling.
Personal attacks on Poettering should not be redirected anywhere. For one thing, personal attacks don't get anyone anywhere. Legitimate criticism of his views should be directed at him, just as legitimate criticism of my views should be directed at me and legitimate criticism of your views should be directed at you. There's no reason to bring any third party into it. No matter how much you hate them or why, that's simply irrelevant.
Meanwhile, on the GitHub issue:
>Locking this one. Note sure which peanut gallery site linked this...
This is clearly a guy who thinks his own opinion is above reproach and the unwashed masses have no right to question him.
Poettering, being a high profile employee of Red Hat, is one of the faces of the company. Because of this, I would argue that Red Hat has a duty to step in from time to time to tell him that what he is doing is harmful in the long term. If they don't do it soon, I can almost guarantee there will be a lot fewer support contracts for Red Hat in the months and years to come; they just don't create dependable developers.
If all Poettering did was community outreach, you would have a much stronger case that he's bad in all aspects of his job and should be fired. Trying to pressure Red Hat by saying it 'reflects poorly on you' is basically saying 'you should get rid of this guy even if you think the good outweighs the bad, because I don't like him.'
If this is true, then this is exactly _why_ the criticism should be directed towards Redhat. Because in his arrogant world view, he can do no wrong, so he will not report to his bosses that he has ineffective community leadership/stewardship. The only way his bosses will know of his ineffective leadership/stewardship is if the criticism is directed towards Redhet, and therefore, his bosses.
I.e., the criticism has to go around the roadblock, Poettering being that roadblock.
Three employees among thousands, representing two projects out of hundreds. Why generalize from that sample? Why ignore all those contributions to the Linux kernel or Fedora, OpenStack or Kubernetes, gcc or coreutils? Some pretty good leaders in there. And if "creating leaders" is supposed to be how we judge companies, what should we make of much larger companies where few employees engage with the community at all? I don't even mean unpopular companies like Microsoft or Oracle. What about Google, for example, or Apple? When it comes to community leadership, they're net negatives; existing leaders go in, and are never heard from again. When every single developer at a billion-dollar-a-year software company is engaged with some open-source community or other (often several), there will be a few losers. That's a poor reason to insult thousands of others.
The whole thing reminds me of how priests and monks would debate the number of angles that could dance on the head of a pin.
So that's basically what uint32 proposes: to make an impact.
The problem you seem to miss is that his arrogant antics _do_ reflect on Redhat, and reflect badly on Redhat. I for one will _never_ use anything from Redhat, nor pay Redhat any money for anything as long as Poettering and the rest of his crew (Seivers et. al.) are employeed by Redhat.
I am sure I am not alone in this viewpoint. As more realize that the problem is a problem at Redhat, eventually Redhat management will be forced to intervene.
PS as an employee, you should be pointing your upper management to these types of discussions, for the very reason that the actions of a loose cannon group is reflecting very badly on Redhat as a whole.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about who you tell. It's about who you're criticizing. Red Hat is not the one making these comments. If you condone a company summarily removing a project leader you don't like, then you also condone a company summarily removing a project leader you do like. That doesn't end well. In fact, I could name projects on which I feel Red Hat has forced their will on upstream entirely too much, to the detriment of both. It's not the way a meritocratic community is supposed to work. I think in general it's better to let technical communities deal with their own issues, and in general Red Hat is wise enough to recognize that.
Believe me, I know where you're coming from. I almost didn't join Red Hat myself because of people like Ulrich Drepper (who was still there) and Al Viro (who would even have been in my group). I understand the sentiment. Criticize Poettering if you want, make sure Red Hat knows the effect that his behavior has on your purchasing decisions, but don't blame them for trying to do the right thing by adhering to a policy with a solid philosophical and practical foundation behind it. Do you want corporate overlords to be meddling in every project's internals?
I can't seem to locate it now. But i seem to recall a video released within the last year so so that showed various people from within RH, regarding the history of Linux. And at one point one of them energetically declared "we won" in regards to some "unix war".
All in all the video gave the impression of a company culture that had the mentality that they could do no wrong.
Start informing Redhat that these responses on Poettering's part reflect badly on them as a whole, and especially _stop_ paying Redhat any money until the issue is resolved, and Redhat will resolve the issue very quickly.
Poettering and Sievers are just freedesktop.org adding another layer of feces on the pile. The fact that people switch distributions to avoid his applications (NetworkManager, PulseAudio, Avahi, systemd), and the fact that someone hacked XBill to include him because he's a worse villain than Bill Gates, should put him on a level that even Ullrich Drepper couldn't touch, and everyone hated that guy.
Redhat has been a useless organization since they chose to promote Havoc Pennington over Carsten Haitzler (longer than any of you have known they exist). Blaming them does nothing to stop their slow lurch over the linux landscape. Boycotting them might, but there are too many RHCE's out there. Best to focus on FDO and Poettering/Sievers.