I feel like you're pushing an agenda & have discarded any possibility of listening to other points of view, or modifying your position. I recognise it as 'listening in bad faith'. I didn't say I liked being inconsistent or tribal, you are putting words into my mouth in an attempt to discredit my position as irrational.
It's still a false choice: I can choose how I spend my time, and I can spend it in a way that I think is effective.
You can choose how you spend your time. But that doesn't mean you can choose how people evaluate that time and if it's fair or not. This is a direct consequence of your own point!
This thing where you suggest I listened in "bad faith" but your point is dancing around the definition of "can" seems pretty bad faith to me.
If I understood your argument correctly, your position is that both Lennart and Linux exhibit aggressive, egotistical, “asshole” behavior. This makes them equally bad and thus condemning Lennart more that Linux is unfair.
I recognse this style of argument as the Continuum Fallacy: that if two things fall into the same scale of badness, then as a whole they are equally bad.
I disagree with this argument, and think it is possible for someone to complain & take action against one problem without being obliged to do the same against another similar problem. I also think that people can choose which problem to address, and do not necessarily have to only address the most egregious issue.
As I understand it, your complaint is that people complain about Lennart’s antisocial behaviour but remain silent on Linus’. I think that, since this topic is regarding systemsd, people will take about Lennart, and as the topic is not about the Linux kernel, people won’t talk about Linus. So, there may be lots of comments addressing Linus’ behaviour, but I wouldn’t expect to see them here.
Finally, I think the thing that makes Linus more acceptable than Lennart is that Linus is open about mistakes and has grown a developement community which encourages collaboration, and his outbursts are directed at changes which don’t match his expectations (which are fairly well established: run tests, check for merge conflicts, etc.).
I hope I have been clearer, and that this helps you make sense of some of the behaviour you have seen that you think is inconsistent/irrational.
The word you're looking for is "non-sympathetic." I certainly am that.
> This makes them equally bad and thus condemning Lennart more that Linux is unfair.
Parsing this, you've subtly mistaken my position. I'll return your gesture in kind: The Free Software as a whole is wracked with a plague of toxic leaders who copy the general lkml-style of aggressiveness, often promoting the fallacy of strictly-correct technological solutions and tying the production of such magical solutions to the capability of an individual as opposed to the capacity of the group.
In this context, the systemd project doesn't particularly stand out. It seems quite normal within a world that nourishes and rewards toxic social ecosystems.
Discarding Systemd uniquely is in this climate for Lennart's behavior is difficult to justify. You can argue his behavior is different and you yourself have a distinct objection to this. As I've said; that's your prerogative. You can in fact decide to give Linus a pass but not Lennart.
But I submit that this process of deciding who can be cruel and who cannot is inherently unfair. It's axiomatically unfair. To further extend that to the basis of technology decisions (that in most cases people far more expert than either of us in the specific field of linux distro maintenance) is to essentially undermine the very reasoning that supports the "meritocracy" that supposedly undermines this ecosystem.
You CAN draw a differentiation, I'm not denying that. They do subtly different things. I in no way defend Lennert's attitude.
If I had my way, I'd throw the lot of them out of their respective projects and install someone more level headed. I genuinely wish we could do that. For me, the good outcome is that people wake up and realize, "Wow, ALL these people are reprehensible and we should lose them all."
> I think the thing that makes Linus more acceptable than Lennart is that Linus is open about mistakes and has grown a developement community which encourages collaboration,
This is you, handing out a pass for bad behavior to Linus. Because "he can grow." Okay, sure. But I've been watching him since the start of the project. I don't think he's grown very much at all except where it financially benefits him.
I think this process of granting dispensation and refusing to censure specific people in the technology community is an epidemic of hero worship. It's an epidemic that leads us to small mistakes (bad mailing list management & tech decisions made against the advice of the principles we claim to cherish) up to large mistakes (Clinkle, Uber, and Github's management was all run with this principle at the fore, and it had disastrous results).
> I think that, since this topic is regarding systemsd, people will take about Lennart, and as the topic is not about the Linux kernel, people won’t talk about Linus.
A bold assertion, given that people are naturally drawing comparisons to that end outside this thread without prompting from me. I take this as evidence the cognitive dissonance of passing Torvalds and condemning Poettering weighs on people when they consider it, and they seek to rationalize it.
