Nice reaction on Lennart's “awful Linux community” post | Hacker News Reader

Nice reaction on Lennart's “awful Linux community” post

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36 pointsLai0chee16 comments

I love how the first response is of the "he deserved it because he created systemd which I don't like" type.

I seriously never expected anyone to ever think that someone deserves personal abuse and insults for writing a piece of software.

Nowhere in the post did the author say that Pottering deserved the threats and harassment.

Verbatim quote from the article: "Again, you do not deserve the threats, and I truly do feel bad that you received them"

From how I read this, the author said that the problem of internet harassment is not a problem of Open Source, but a problem of the internet in general.

I believe izacus was referring to the first reply/comment to the linked post, not the linked post itself.

Poettering might not be the best leader or the best team player, but I don't think pointing at Linus for this is off-limits. Yes, the internet is full or anonymous idiots and that's not Linus' fault. But as leader of the community, the tone he sets is certainly not a good example, all the contrary, many will feel empowered to be assholes to other community members.

I'm really not happy with how eager people are to go "well, that's just the internet, it's a wider problem, not our problem". Yes it is their problem, because it affects their community and the people they work with, and even if the problem did not originate within them personally, it's up to them to take a stance against it instead of using it as cover for their own criticism of Poettering.

Do you read lkml or just the media reports of Linus' cursing?

Ugh more linux politics. Who cares if he blocked you. Get over it. Move on, write code.

This.

Puts me right off the community hearing this to and fro all the time.

This isn't about the software Poettering wrote, but instead it's about how he has a chance here to reflect on how the community responds.

It's terrible that he was trolled with death threats. I won't feed the trolls.

Okay, so because Lennart Poettering blocked some dude on a social network for ranting about how terrible systemd is, Poettering deserves death threats and it's all his own fault. Got it.

All this post really says is "maybe the way Poettering is being treated is completely unacceptable, sure, but have you considered that he wrote systemd?? Isn't that more important??"

He wrote:

> you do not deserve the threats, and I truly do feel bad that you received them

And anyway I think people are making a lot out of these so-called death threats. I mean there's plenty of idiots on the internet, and I'm sure famous people receive plenty of idiotic emails including, why not, "death threats", except that they ignore them and move on.

He explicitly says the opposite of that in his post , "This is the first time I've heard about the death threats he has been receiving. Nobody deserves such threats. The internet is filled with such vile low lifes. I condemn all such threats.".

I think the post is meant to defend Linus who is presumably not sending such threats.

Yes, he makes sure to condemn all such threats, but then he goes on to put the blame with them on Poettering. He doesn't say "Nobody deserves such threats, I condemn all such threats, and I stand with Poettering against them even tho i profesionally disagree with the guy", he basically says "maybe don't piss people off if you can't handle the abuse".

It seems like he is trying to separate the issues. Perhaps he believes that whatever criticism Lennart received from Linus is justified but that the abuse from anonymous trolls is not.

Perhaps he's not, but he certainly can't escape any blame if he writes things such as:

'...should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?'

or stating he hoped ARM system-on-chip (SoC) developers would "all die in some incredibly painful accident."

A good rule when communicating online is not to write anything you wouldn't say to someone's face.

I feel like the nice here should be in quotes.

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