Sorry Lennart, but you are wrong once again

Lennart Poettering’s post in G+ is gathering a lot of attention these days, most of the feedback is supportive, and positive, which is not surprising to me, because although Poettering would like us to believe otherwise, most of the open source community is pretty accommodating and non-confrontational.

I am however going to go against the current here, and criticize him, but first let me state clearly that I do not condone any physical attacks towards his person, or the threats of such. His ideas however are a different matter.

Lennart’s chief mistake is to attack the way the Linux’s kernel community is run, and say their success happens despite this. How does he know? Has he ever run a more successful community? Has anybody ever? Linux is the most successful software project in history, by more than one order of magnitude from any way you look at it. It would be presumptuous for anybody to say they know how to run this project better, specially without any evidence to back such claim, which is precisely what Poettering is doing.

In this blog I’ve analyzed the many reasons why the Linux kernel is so successful, and one of them is its combative style of discussion in which ideas are not exempt from ridicule, and strong language is often used to drive one’s point home as efficiently as possible. Many people in the community agree this is desirable, and there’s even scientific evidence that supports this notion; the best ideas arise in a confrontational environment, not in a protective one.

What’s more, Poettering himself accepts he hasn’t been involved in this community. So what the hell does he know about it? Nothing.

Poettering’s second mistake is to assume that for non-white, non-western, non-straight people the situation surely must be worst… That is not the case. Maybe, just maybe, he receives such vitriolic feedback not just because of what he does, but because of the horrible way he does it. Of course not, Poettering doesn’t need to change, his approach is perfect, in fact, the only reason he receives criticism is because he is too progressive, too audacious, too efficient, surely, that must be the reason!

Personally, my beef with Poettering starts from the fact that he blocked me from Google+. Why? Because I was complaining about a technical issue with systemd, which he initially spotted and commented, but then ignored. In the middle of the discussion I made some value judgements about certain systemd code, and he stopped responding and blocked me. That is the worst way to end a discussion; block the people who disagree with you.

Sorry Lennart, but actions have consequences, and you can only do so much disruptive changes to the Linux ecosystem without much care or consideration for others, there’s a limit to the amount of people you can block, and the criticism you ignore. You can grow as thick a skin as you want, you are still wrong. No community is going to let you continue being wrong and acting as if you are beyond reproach just like that (unless you run that community and have blocked any dissident voices of course).

Maybe it’s time to take a hard look in the mirror.