Dear Lennart, the FOSS community is not evil – it depends on you

I too thought Lennart's diatribe was a little awkward. It's not that Lennart didn't have valid concerns (though I personally think all this drama over Linus is getting cliched), but he just seemed to have a total lack of self-awareness. Imagine if Ulrich Drepper wrote a rant on sloppy management back when he was still maintaining glibc. He may or may not have been correct, but it'd be very hypocritical if he didn't acknowledge that to an extent, he's a part of the problem.

Moreover, some of his examples left me unconvinced. I could only find one petition sardonically suggesting for him to stop developing "useless" software, however... another counter-petition later ended up emerging in his support (https://www.change.org/p/lennart-poettering-continue-writing...). In addition, Ulrich Drepper has received plenty of bug reports that all scolded his behavior, and even Linus Torvalds was the subject of a petition concerning removing RdRand from /dev/random. Point is: controversial people are controversial.

He then goes on to mention the website about boycotting systemd. It's fairly obvious that systemd is a highly controversial piece of software, so arguments against it are expected. I agree that the presentation is pretty off-putting and confrontational, but I didn't see any "personal attacks".

However, the part about hiring a hitman through Bitcoin really caught my attention. That does sound awful, so I decided to look into it a bit.

As it turns out, the story is actually much more tame. What happened was that a few Maemo developers on IRC were angry over the Consistent Network Device Naming feature of udev, trash talked a bit and then went on to different technical topics. After some irrelevant fare, the topic was raised again with the timestamps between 18:21:51 and 20:04:59.

There is no grand plot to kill Lennart. In fact, the word "Bitcoin" was mentioned only once. It's a bunch of developers acting facetious and trash talking, and it's all absolutely baseless. I have no idea why Lennart brought it up. Logs can be found here: http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.tx...

Ultimately, I think the whole thing is blown out of proportion, and what worries me is that all this will pretty much end up silencing criticism of systemd even further.