[uint32]

Poettering's behaviour ultimately reflects poorly on his employer, Red Hat. It seems like they just allow this behaviour to continue unchecked.

The personal attacks on Poettering should be directed to Red Hat instead, who actually have the power to do something about it.

[notacoward]

Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat.

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.

[baconmania]

>Legitimate criticism of his views should be directed at him

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.

[stephen_g]

Most of the discussion on that issue was just useless noise after it got picked up by HN and other sites though, so it makes sense to close that one down for now.

[digi_owl]

After it happens enough time you would think a lightbulb would turn somewhere...

[the_why_of_y]

I think there was a light going on: they found that bugzilla.freedesktop.org doesn't offer the right ACL tools to keep the trolls away, so they migrated to github.com's issue tracker.

[uuoc]

> Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat.

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.

[notacoward]

> As more realize that the problem is a problem at Redhat, eventually Redhat management will be forced to intervene.

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?

[kiproping]

This is what I hate. This whole attack the employer for the employees opinion. This is backward and disgusting. This is the same tactic used by tumblr and twitter in their witch-hunts against people who have an opinion they don't like. It's despicable.

[fanf2]

Another example is Red Hat's long support of the awful Ulrich Drepper.

[Sanddancer]

I know I'm a tiny fish in the game, but because of the behaviors of Red Hat employees, I am disenclined to purchase products they make, and even use Linux as a whole. People ask my advice, I give it, but don't have control over pursestrings, or anything like that. However, the behavior of Red Hat employees, like Poettering, Sievers, and Drepper before them makes me believe that Red Hat is not an organization that does a good job of creating leaders. The aforementioned people are poor stewards of projects, showing poor technical decision making and poor communications ability, and it reflects poorly on the organization as a whole.

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.

[Dr_tldr]

What you're doing is a bullshit power move in attempting to threaten someone's job because you don't like their attitude. One discussion where someone was an arrogant douche might be outweighed by the sum total of all their contributions.

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.'

[Sanddancer]

No, this is a decision on the fact that he has made many many discussions where he was an arrogant douche. This is a decision made where he's made many many technical flaws, such as including the fundamentally broken efivarsfs in systemd, in choosing poor defaults for other portions of systemd, like pointing the default ntp server against a source which says not to use it as such, like in making the easily-corrupted journal an inexorable part of systemd. He has a long track record of making questionable decisions and then getting downright petulant when criticized. He's being paid in part to be a leader of a few high profile projects when he shows a lack of leadership ability. That's why I feel he should be gotten rid of.

[notacoward]

Perhaps you're right that he should be gotten rid of, but redirecting criticism of him toward Red Hat is precisely not the way to achieve that. Red Hat won't care if you criticize them as a company. Why should they? However, effective community leadership/stewardship is part of the job description for someone like Poettering. If a person's conduct is poor, criticism should remain focused on them individually. If there's enough such criticism, then the project's own community should act to resolve the situation. It's both less optimal and less likely for an employer or sponsor to take action, but even then it would only be due to criticism of the individual and not themselves. One of the nice things about open source is that it's resistant to such political "get you in trouble with your boss" backstabbing. Address the individual directly and honestly, or forget it.

[notacoward]

Since HN won't let me respond to uuoc directly, I'll respond here. I wasn't saying criticism should only be directed to its target. That's not the kind of "redirection" people seemed to be suggesting. What I'm saying is that the criticism should remain about that person, not displaced onto some third party. Believe it or not, it's possible to see how someone's behavior is affecting a project, without relying on that person to convey such information themselves. We've all done it here, after all. Anybody who thinks it's reasonable to blame individual behavior on someone's employer should consider whether they'd be comfortable with the idea when it's their behavior and their employer involved. I doubt it.

[uuoc]

> However, effective community leadership/stewardship is part of the job description for someone like Poettering.

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.

[notacoward]

> Poettering, Sievers, and Drepper

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.

[digi_owl]

The way i see it is not so much the individuals, but that so much of the traffic between them happens within the corporate realm that by the time it hits the public repositories they have all agreed on some iron clad world view.

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.

[krick]

> That freedom is only curtailed when it directly impacts paying customers

So that's basically what uint32 proposes: to make an impact.

[digi_owl]

That sounds like a lovely bit of legal ass covering.

[Sanddancer]

Redhat unfortunately seems beyond reproach by many, even with all the bad behavior they've allowed under their watch. Ulrich Drepper was an employee of theirs during his most imfamous time as glibc maintainer. Their purchase of Cygnus scattered a lot of real interesting systems development tools, like the Insight debugger, to the wind. Unfortunately, they're one of the loudest mouths in the room, so a lot of their bullshit doesn't get called out, leaving everything worse for the wear.

[digi_owl]

And having them all under one (virtual) roof may be producing a echo chamber effect among them.

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.

[bonzini]

The "Unix wars" refers to the fights among Linux and the various proprietary Unixes (AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris etc.). "We won" referred to Linux, not Red Hat. Of all the proprietary Unixes, only Solaris is still alive and it's partly open source too.

[uuoc]

Hear hear, until Redhat begins to feel some heat from Poettering's (and Seivers and the rest of these fools), these fools will just continue on their arrogant bull in a china factory path they are presently on.

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.

[anonbanker]

At the risk of a No True Scotsman Fallacy, No linux user uses Redhat for more than 2 years before hating everything about life, or moving on to something better (or getting paid to support the monstrosity). The company seems to thrive on PT Barnum's philosophy of a sucker being born every minute.

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.

[digi_owl]

On that note, Freedesktop was founded by Pennington...

[strictfp]

RedHat employees have always been quite quirky types working alone with a "luser" attitude. Sad but true.