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Longtime Debian contributor Tollef Fog Heen has announced his resignation from the Debian systemd maintainer team. His announcement states that "the load of the continued attacks is just becoming too much."
He has since written a detailed blog article surrounding the circumstances of his resignation. As he puts it,
I've been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any storm, shouldn't I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn down by the rain. It's not a single hurtful comment here and there. There's a constant drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy and there are sometimes flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of incompetence.
This is yet another dramatic event affecting the Debian project in recent months. The adoption of systemd has been extremely controversial, even going so far as to result in calls for Debian to be forked. There have been other problems as of late, too, ranging from a serious bug breaking Wine just days before the Jessie freeze deadline, to the possibility of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD being dropped from Debian 8. And it was only just over a week ago that Joey Hess — another longtime Debian contributor — left the project, citing the "very unhealthy directions" that Debian has been led in lately.
Is the internal tension and strife caused by systemd about to tear the Debian project apart? Recent events such as the aforementioned have suggested that this is becoming more and more of a possibility. The repercussions of this drama will no doubt be felt wide and far, given Debian's own popularity, as well it forming the basis of other major Linux distros such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday November 17 2014, @01:37PM
Like I say, I have no opinion on whether it's good or bad. I'm not saying that people against don't have a point.
I'm not talking about people's arguments, but the way they are making them. This isn't a rational technical discussion about a bit of software. It's a holy war potential to damage the Linux community.
Now, if someone wanted to damage the Linux community, and they saw a divisive topic arise, wouldn't it be in their interest to fan the flames a little using tried-and-true astroturfing techniques?
Call me a crazy conspiracy theorist if you like, but just remember how many crazy conspiracy theorists were proved right by Snowden.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @03:20PM
I, too, just don't see the conspiracy.
The ones harming the Linux community the most are those who are forcing systemd on unwilling victims. Things were just fine before they showed up.
But I don't think there's a conspiracy there, either. The pro-systemd crowd is just ignorant, inexperienced, delusional, or a mix of those three.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday November 17 2014, @03:32PM
If you read back through Slashdot (and here, but probably less) articles, there have been a number of technical objections raised and dismissed. Unfortunately you'd have to wade through a lot of bile to find them :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"