The systemd age attestation controversy

In yesterday’s Office Hour, we discussed systemd, especially systemd timers. Then the question was raised why there is so much backlash against systemd in some circles. Here’s a short summary of my answer:

• systemd is becoming kind of an “OS within the OS”. That this runs counter to the Unix philosophy’s “small programs working together” rubs people, especially the more puristic ones, the wrong way.
• systemd author Lennart Pöttering has strong opinions, and some people seem to think that they have to offer even stronger counter-arguments, to put it lightly.

Technical differences can and should be debated. We have a wealth of talented developers in the open-source community. By putting their heads together, they have created, and will keep creating, remarkable pieces of software.

What should never, ever, happen, is that developers get death threats for their decisions. That actually happened after Dylan M. Taylor submitted a pull request to add a field to store (NB: and only store) a user’s birthdate in systemd’s JSON user records. Here’s a gift link to an LWN article that lays out the whole story well.

I find behaviour as described in the article absolutely unacceptable. In Open Source, we’re a community, and mob mentality has no place in it.