Lennart Poettering (born 15 October 1980) is a German

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

working for

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and the original author of PulseAudio, Avahi and

systemd systemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. The main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its primary component is a "system and service manage ...

Life and career

Poettering was born in

Guatemala City Guatemala City (, also known colloquially by the nickname Guate), is the Capital city, national capital and largest city of the Guatemala, Republic of Guatemala. It is also the Municipalities of Guatemala, municipal capital of the Guatemala Depa ...

but grew up in

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, or simply Rio, is the capital of the Rio de Janeiro (state), state of Rio de Janeiro. It is the List of cities in Brazil by population, second-most-populous city in Brazil (after São Paulo) and the Largest cities in the America ...

Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...

, and

Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. Poettering worked for

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

from 2008 to 2022. He then joined

. Since 2003, Poettering has worked on more than 40 projects, mostly written in C. He is the developer and maintainer of several

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

projects which have been widely adopted by

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

distributions, including PulseAudio sound server (2004), Avahi

zeroconf Zero-configuration networking (zeroconf) is a set of technologies that automatically creates a usable computer network based on the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) when computers or network peripherals are interconnected. It does not require manu ...

implementation (2005), and

init system (2010).

Controversies

Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the Linux ecosystem. His style has brought accusations that he is working against long-standing

Unix philosophy The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to Minimalism (computing), minimalist, Modularity (programming), modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading devel ...

, which he addressed in his blog post ''The Biggest Myths.'' For instance, Poettering has advocated speeding up Linux development at the expense of breaking compatibility with

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

and other

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s such as the

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

s. He took this position because of his experience in writing some other low-level components in the desktop stack. He invites other developers to do the same. Poettering recommends also reading ''

The Linux Programming Interface ''The Linux Programming Interface: A Linux and UNIX System Programming Handbook'' is a book written by Michael Kerrisk, which documents the Application programming interface, APIs of the Linux kernel and the GNU C Library (glibc). Book The boo ...

'' but ignoring the POSIX-specific parts. In 2011 Poettering, one of the main developers of PulseAudio, praised the Windows and macOS audio stacks as "more advanced" and called

Open Sound System The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices system calls (i.e. POSIX read, write, ioctl, etc.). The term also sometimes refers to ...

"a simplistic 90's style audio stack" without relevance for a modern desktop. Also in 2011, when asked why the Linux desktop hadn't been widely adopted by mainstream users, he answered that: "Linux is still too fragmented... ndneeds to be streamlined...". In 2014 Poettering published an essay criticising how software in Linux distros is commonly packaged, updated, and deployed; and laid out proposals that he,

Kay Sievers Kay Sievers is a German computer programmer, best known for developing the udev device manager of Linux, systemd and the Gummiboot EFI bootloader. Kay Sievers made major contributions to Linux's hardware hotplug and device management subsystems ...

, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack, Tom Gundersen and David Herrmann, had for how the architecture should be changed.Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems
on 0pointer.net by Lennart Poettering ''"The classic Linux distribution scheme is frequently not what end users want, either. Many users are used to app markets like Android, Windows or iOS/Mac have. Markets are a platform that doesn't package, build or maintain software like distributions do, but simply allows users to quickly find and download the software they need, with the app vendor responsible for keeping the app updated, secured, and all that on the vendor's release cycle."'' (1 September 2014) The controversy around systemd culminated in personal attacks and alleged

death threat A death threat is a threat, often made anonymously, by one person or a group of people to kill another person or group of people. These threats are often designed to intimidate victims in order to manipulate their behaviour, in which case a d ...

s against Poettering. Poettering went on to put some blame on

Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds ( , ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git. He was honored, along with Shinya Yam ...

and other kernel developers for being bad

role model A role model is a person whose behaviour, example, or success serves as a model to be emulated by others, especially by younger people. The term ''role model'' is credited to sociologist Robert K. Merton, who hypothesized that individuals compa ...

s for encouraging an abusive discussion culture on technical disagreements. In 2017, Poettering received the Pwnie Award for Lamest Vendor Response to

vulnerabilities Vulnerability refers to "the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally." The understanding of social and environmental vulnerability, as a methodological approach, involves ...

reported in systemd.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Poettering, Lennart 1980 births Free software programmers Living people Linux people German computer programmers People from Guatemala City Microsoft employees