I (along with about 6 million other people, according to the little statistics widget alongside it) just saw this rather heartbreaking post from Lennart Poettering.

I have not had much occasion to interact with Lennart personally, and (like many people) I have experienced bugs in the software he has written. I have been frustrated by those bugs. I may not have always been charitable in my descriptions of his software. I have, however, always assumed good faith on his part and been happy that he continues making valuable contributions to the free software ecosystem. I haven’t felt the need to make that clear in the past because I thought it was understood.

Apparently, not only is it not understood, there is active hostility directed against his participation. There is constant, aggressive, bad-faith attempts to get him to stop working on the important problems he is working on.

So, Lennart,

Thank you for your work on GNOME, for working on the problem of getting free software into the hands of normal people. Thank you for furthering the cause of free software by creating PulseAudio, so that we can at least attempt to allow users to play sound on their Linux computers from multiple applications simultaneously without writing tedious configuration files. Thank you for your work on SystemD, attempting to bring modern system-startup and service-management practices to the widest possible free software audience. Thank you, Lennart, for putting up with all these vile personal attacks while you have done all of these things. I know you could have walked away; I’m sure that at times, you wanted to. Thank you for staying anyway and continuing to do the good work that you’ve done.

While the abuse is what prompted me to write this, I should emphasize that my appreciation is real. As a long-time user of Linux both on the desktop and in the cloud, I know that my life has been made materially better by Lennart’s work.

This shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of any specific technical position that Mr. Poettering holds. The point is that it doesn’t have to be: this isn’t about whether he’s right or not, it’s about whether we can have the discussion about whether he’s right in a calm, civil, technical manner. In fact I don’t agree with all of his technical choices, but I’m not going to opine about that here, because he’s putting in the work and I’m not, and he’s fighting many battles for software freedom (most of them against our so-called “allies”) that I haven’t been involved in.

The fact that he felt the need to write an article on the hideous state of the free software community is as sad as it is predictable. As a guest on a podcast recently, I praised the Linux community’s technical achievements while critiquing its poisonous culture. Now I wonder if “critiquing” is strong enough; I wonder if I should have given any praise at all. We should all condemn this kind of bilious ad-hominem persecution.

Today I am saying “thank you” to Lennart because the toxicity in our communities is not a vague, impersonal force that we can discuss academically. It is directed at specific individuals, in an attempt to curtail their participation. We need to show those targetted people, regardless of how high-profile they are, or whether they’re paid for their work or not, that they are not alone, that they have our gratitude. It is bullying, pure and simple, and we should not allow it to stand.

Software is made out of feelings. If we intend to have any more free software, we need to respect and honor those feelings, and, frankly speaking, stop trying to make the people who give us that software feel like shit.