Because what has happened to Lennart is pretty horrible.
Pulseaudio and systemd are two of the best things to happen to Linux in years.
Have you considered that a flexible, high-quality OS audio subsystem might be difficult to bang out in one weekend?
> ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable.
Are you kidding? Every desktop install before pulseaudio was a crapshoot when it came to audio.
> I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot of OSS software is it's used a replacement for working software when it's not quite ready.
No-one forced anyone to switch to pulseaudio, and has any software ever been perfect in release 0.1? I personally upgraded straight from Debian squeeze (default ALSA) to wheezy (default Pulse) without a single issue, because pulseaudio wasn't integrated until it was stable.
> What I don't like is the hooks that systemd places into software it has no business touching, like Gnome.
It's not like systemd people sneaked their "hooks" into Gnome. Gnome switched to systemd interfaces (e.g. logind) because they fixed real bugs!
> Userland software should not be touched by this. Full stop.
It isn't! Developers are just switching because it is better.
Wow. This post is a good example of the baseless accusations Lennart has to put up with.
EDIT: Other than that, it _does_ work quite well nowadays.
The GNOME developers simply had two choices: keep using the old, bug-ridden and still-unmaintained ConsoleKit or switch to the simpler, more powerful logind D-Bus interface.
ConsoleKit is still more-or-less supported upstream, but given it's extreme bugginess many distro choose to disable it and rely on logind interfaces.
Note that this does not mean that GNOME depends on systemd: as long as something else is implementing the needed logind interfaces (eg. systemd-shims) GNOME will happily run.
And no, a maintainer refusing patches is absolutely not "antithetical to the spirit of open source". The spirit of open source is that you can fork if you don't agree with a maintainer. It's simple as that.
Consolekit could live on top of any and all inits out there. Logind balks if it does not have systemd sitting as pid1.
No, thanks. systemd's interfaces are publicly available and with good enough documentation. Most of them are even declared stable, only the internal ones are obviously free to change.
In fact many project are now attempting to reimplement systemd's interfaces as this is how FLOSS work.
Of course the alternative doesn't exist yet when the interfaces change every week.
And systemd's definition of "internal" is rather dubious; to most of us, udev or journald should be separate components that can be swapped out.
Of course internal interface are not stable and sparsely documented, but they are just that, internal.
Reimplementors should only bother about the public interfaces.
Note that udev does not use systemd internal interfaces and happily runs on non-systemd systems.
Journald can be disabled if you don't want it, or you want to run it on non-systemd?
It's certainly wrong to turn that to personal attacks against him, but I can understand why people disliked PulseAudio then Systemd - and even hated these projects because they caused breakage in numerous systems, hours to try to fix it, and ended up with justifications like "it's by design" or "you don't understand why but it's better this way".
Isn't that how open source is /supposed/ to work? TBH, as a Debian user, I'm quite happy with the "Lennart releases theoretically brilliant but practically buggy apps, Ubuntu / Arch users suffer for a few months, Debian integrates the system once it's stable" workflow :)
PulseAudio was unfortunately released in Ubuntu even before Lennart & co. declared it releasable, so it was Ubuntu's fault if it gained a reputation of being "unfinished" (indeed it was, but it was not a fault of the PulseAudio team).