[adjejmxbdjdn]

So he creates a program that was good enough that pretty much everyone started using it.

And he complained about a lot of dependencies but then went and actually wrote fixes/solutions for them that was so good that nearly everyone started using and even depending on it.

It sounds like the people who were sitting on the sidelines complaining about his complaining had ample opportunities to write better alternatives than the programs he wrote but didn’t do so. Instead they relied on character attacks and FUD (well, except the folks who developed pipewire), while Poettering wa engage in elite hacking by implementing solutions and letting users and distro makers decide whether they wanted to use those solutions.

I don’t see how Poettering is the villain here.

[nottorp]

> I don’t see how Poettering is the villain here.

Poettering seems to be good at politics. Where politics means having his way.

Not so much at writing working code, or interoperability.

[ahartmetz]

>good at politics

A son of GDR diplomats, according to an old version of his Wikipedia page. That information seems to be memory-holed now. Now you only find that he grew up in South America without any hint of a reason.

[Avshalom]

Look, I was in CS101 back in those days so I'm not really qualified to say who was right about where/with-what responsibility for bugs lied. Maybe he was completely right and just kind of a dick about it. I'm just reporting that no one liked him and that carried over to the introduction of systemd.