[NANDXORNOR]

I don't have a horse in this race, but isn't it a good idea to as they say: 'don't give them a reason to hate you'.

From what I've seen the good intentions behind systemd were marred by the fact that when it was announced the (mostly skeptical) responses to it were met by systemd supporters who held the attitude 'we're saving nix, join us or nix dies', and this has created the current atmosphere of debate.

While these death threats and the like are in no doubt horrible, it seems that some bridges need to be built between the people who support systemd and those who do not, because the attitudes on both sides of the argument are rather poor, and this makes the open source community look even worse.

Edit: I said nothing about systemd users currently making threats, rather that their attitude at the beginning of the project at some level caused the response that we see today. They are not completely to blame, as are not the people who are against systemd and do not send death threats. Regardless, it seems that recently, HN only supports the idea of 'there is no gray, only black and white'. People like these are the reason why the systemd creators cannot engage in debate, because on both sides the people who shout the loudest win out over the reasonable voices.

[infinity0]

I too will offer solidarity and hopefully absorb some of the downvotes. I don't know who is downvoting you; your points seem quite reasonable. It is unclear that actual death threats have been made. In either case, this is irrelevant to the technical merit of systemd. We should not let valid criticisms of systemd be derailed by inappropriate focusing on death threats, which is a separate issue from hating systemd for technical reasons.

I can see that systemd as a piece of software has many benefits. However, as a software project, the attitude as you mention, is a major problem. In my one single minor interaction with systemd people, I already agree with this criticism:

"My experiences with systemd's Debian maintainers (and, indirectly, systemd's upstream) have been far from satisfactory in this regard. Instead of taking a flexible approach, and being willing to provide a range of glue facilities and approaches for different daemon upstreams, the systemd community seems doctrinaire. Daemon authors are expected to do as they are told by systemd upstream, rather than systemd upstream making things comfortable for daemon developers.

This is IMO the opposite of the proper attitude."

(from https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2013/12/msg00182.html)

This counts as a "technical reason". Though not directly about the software itself, a project with such an attitude should not be relied on because the people in control do not have your best interests in the long run.

[Alupis]

I'm pretty certain that when someone actually tries to hire an assassin to murder the creator of a free software project simply because they disagree with said software project, things have gone way, way too far.

People who support systemd are not launching personal attacks, calling for physical harm against non-systemd supporters. This is a unidirectional attack. And it needs to stop.

[cthalupa]

>when someone actually tries to hire an assassin to murder the creator of a free software projec

Has this ever been substantiated? From my understanding, the "death threats" were more along the lines of people saying awful things like "I hope Lennart gets run over", not "I am hiring someone to shoot you". Lennart made a comment about a bitcoin collection, but provided no actual proof. Personally, I'm skeptical - I've seen quite a bit of vitriol about systemd, but never anyone campaigning for bitcoins to hire a hitman. It seems like a rather easy way to bring a lot of discredit to your detractors.

Even the former is obviously not acceptable, but no one is being done any favors if we suddenly conflate an offhand mean spirited comment with actual death threats or attempts on someone's life.

Edit: Someone linked the actual conversation - http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.tx...

It's obviously a joke and not an actual attempt to hire a hitman. They shortly after proceed to talk about how Red Hat has replacement clones if anything were to happen, anyway.

Is it a shitty joke? yes. Is it mean spirited? Yes. Is it the same thing as actually trying to have someone kill the man? No.

[Joeboy]

I will offer solidarity and hopefully absorb some of your downvotes.

Yes, it is clearly a joke.

[icebraining]

Making it a "systemd critics" issue will just alienate sane people from the debate. Disliking systemd is not a club, requiring approval for membership. Even if this is a one-sided issue, that doesn't mean it's an issue of the whole side.

[tedunangst]

> when someone actually tries to hire an assassin

What???

[desdiv]

From the horse's mouth:

Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!).

https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

[A_COMPUTER]

His name was on a fallacious bitcoin "assassination market" only accessible over Tor, basically just a website you could submit names to, with an associated bitcoin address. An obvious scam to glean free bitcoin. The hit man claim is complete horse shit.

[tedunangst]

Oh! I assumed "tried" implied "tried and failed", but it seems the effort is ongoing? I guess the shutdown of Silk Road 2.0 will delay things for a while.

[felixgallo]

What was it that Gandhi said? First you sneer at people, then you lie to people, then when caught out you make up stories to try to get sympathy? Wasn't that it?

[nandhp]

https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.tx... (Ctrl-F hitman)

[ctz]

Is an IRC chatlog the best evidence we have that "this really happened"?

[eksith]

"While these death threats and the like are in no doubt horrible..." Then let's stop there.

No bridge is sacred enough to warrant physical threats when burned. No attitude poor enough to elicit the response that this did. It's bloody software.

[rbanffy]

> It's bloody software.

Worse. It's bloody open-source software.

You don't like it, you fork the last version you did and start from there. If enough people agree with you, you'll be fine. If not, you are probably wrong.

[eksith]

Amen. Actually that would have been the better outcome anyway since it adds entropy to the gene pool. Cross pollination of ideas could have benefitted both parties. And even if your side doesn't take the cake, enough people would have flocked to the source that we could have fixed some bugs and resolved potential security issues due to the addition of more eyes.

Looking from afar, you'd think this was some tiff over imaginary lines on a map or something. Now that would be silly.

[techdragon]

It happened.

Gentoo is waiting to welcome all the systemD haters. OpenRC is going strong.

We also support systemD as well because USE flags rock.

In fact being able to see the sysV and systemD init files side by site was what finally convinced me it is an improvement. An improvement with many questionable additions... Like free money attached with losing my 25/20 eyesight to normal 20/20 or some other minor debilitating affliction.

[rbanffy]

The Debian exiles will miss apt badly. Apt was what made me move from Red Hat.

[zanny]

Having used Zypper, Yum, Apt, and Pacman, I'd have to rank them pacman > zypper > apt > yum. Have you tried the others? Apt syntax is so cumbersome using either the Suse or Arch package manager.

[nitrogen]

Gentoo's emerge/portage is pretty nice, though it's been years since I've used it.