So a thing I talk about a lot not publicly is about Lennart Poettering

He made a tool to improve Linux audio when Linux audio desperately needed it. He was 19 and ambitious. I wish I had that kind of talent and drive at 19. He failed, pulse audio is terrible and worse than everything else. However, it got alsa and oss to do a lot of improvements, those projects became better.

He wrote a bonjour implementation for Linux, which, if bonjour ever did a thing, would have been good. Sadly, Apple hasn't made bonjour work well, and avahi sucks. So no one is trying, but that was important.

At this point, he got hired at Red Hat, and he was given a lot of leeway. That's important, that leeway allowed him to work on what he wanted. He was an important icon, he had skill and drive.

And he decided to fix init. A lot of people were arguing about init and its problems. There is a lot to talk about. And since he worked for Red Hat, they used his init tool. The problem was that his project sucked. It was badly made, badly architected, and in no way accomplished its goals.

But Red Hat used it.

Lennart Poettering had a lot of opportunity, a lot of drive, and a lot of ability to *do work*. If he had been taught, mentored, and helped, he might have contributed to Linux on the scale of so many of the greats. But instead, the attitude is "sling code or shut up". On one side, there were people saying that Linux audio sucked, init sucked, and bonjour was cool. On the other side, there was a person making something that worked on those problems. He made those problems worse, he made Linux worse, and less pleasant to be involved in, but he *did* something. Because there's no tools in open source to take a talented newb and teach them, criticise them, and give them feedback.

There's no tools in open source to tell people that their idea is good, but implementation is awful. It's all take it or leave it. Systemd is a failure of community management.