Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I know nothing about this man, so I decided to look him up...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversi...

"The "Poettering effect" is now sometimes used as a negative term for presumed damage his mindset is doing to opensource communities."

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry-pi/...

I guess there's two sides to every story...

What a strange situation.



But notice that's all technical in nature--what he's discussing is abuse and harassment. I don't know a lot about the context, but if he's right, those are very different things--not really two sides at all.


He says "Wow, what an awful community Linux has!". How is that "technical in nature"?


No, the reasons people dislike him are primarily technical in nature: they don't trust the things he creates. They respond by attacking him in a very personal and abusive way.

That's not an issue that has two sides. That's an issue about his technical work, and then some people doing something abusive. There's two sides to that technical debate, but there's only one side to the other debate, and that's "stop being awful." There would only be two sides if the technical issues surrounding his work somehow justified the abuse. And they don't, because basically nothing justifies that kind of abuse in the tech world.

The comment "Linux is an awful community" is not technical, but it came after the abuse. Hopefully you can see that there's a difference between that and threatening someone.


"Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the linux ecosystem"

It seems to read that he is basically going around systematically "upsetting the applecart".

Now, whether he's doing that technically or otherwise, it's still having an effect on the ecosystem. You can't detach yourself from that.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: