Author of Systemd Quits Microsoft To Prove Linux Can Be Trusted
7 124Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft to co-found Amutable, a new Berlin-based company aiming to bring cryptographically verifiable integrity and deterministic trust guarantees to Linux systems. He said in a post on Mastodon that his "role in upstream maintenance for the Linux kernel will continue as it always has." Poettering will also continue to remain deeply involved in the systemd ecosystem. The Register reports: Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kuhl and Christian Brauner. Poettering is best known for systemd. After a lengthy stint at Red Hat, he joined Microsoft in 2022. Kuhl was a Microsoft employee until last year, and Brauner, who also joined Microsoft in 2022, left this month. [...]
It is unclear why Poettering decided to leave Microsoft. We asked the company to comment but have not received a response. Other than the announcement of systemd 259 in December, Poettering's blog has been silent on the matter, aside from the announcement of Amutable this week. In its first post, the Amutable team wrote: "Over the coming months, we'll be pouring foundations for verification and building robust capabilities on top."
It will be interesting to see what form this takes. In addition to Poettering, the lead developer of systemd, Amutable's team includes contributors and maintainers for projects such as Linux, Kubernetes, and containerd. Its members are also very familiar with the likes of Debian, Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu.
7 comments
Linux can be trusted (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @05:08AM (#65960660)
Poettering can't.
Re:Linux can be trusted (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @07:27AM (#65960696)
It's pithy and funny, but it's true. Poettering is the enemy of Linux, open source, and security, which is why he was hired and well-paid by Microsoft. My guess is that they're still paying him to set up this sham company in order to continue sabotaging Linux.
If the Linux community had any sense, they would blacklist this asshole -- from EVERYTHING -- for life.
uh (Score: 5, Insightful)
by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) on <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday January 31, 2026 @07:31AM (#65960698)
Poettering will also continue to remain deeply involved in the systemd ecosystem.
I therefore trust that it will continue to be shit.
Re:uh (Score: 5, Interesting)
by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @08:03AM (#65960720)
When I was at Meta (briefly) and in SV startup land, there were way too many Poettering (and Musk) fanboys. While I grew up in SV, I was gentrified out and renounce asshole VCs, managers, engineers, and broligarchs, and now I'm elsewhere with saner housing prices.
daemontools and runit at least were simple and dependable, could drop-in and stop services on-the-fly, and didn't have a weird-ass broken state where it refused to start because it failed X times before. Oh and GFL shipping systemd syslog to other systems. syslog-ng was even more performant and robust than rsyslog, even though rsyslog was nicer to configure.
Re:uh (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @09:11AM (#65960776)
Overrated. Prior to systemd Linux administrators famously admin'd thousands of systems vs tens in the windows world. That text/file/directory-based system combined with all the text-mangling power tools in linux, the shell, and perl... nothing compares.
It actually becomes much easier to work with configuration management tools when they are managing the state of text files as the Linux gods intended.
Re:uh (Score: 5, Insightful)
by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @10:37AM (#65960870)
What was the point of the journal log system? We had stable tools for decades for manipulating and managing text logs. So systemd made the logs binary and then re-invented all the same tools but slightly different. Same as with ifconfig. Worked great for decades and now it’s replaced with “ip” and a different syntax. What was gained?
Trust? (Score: 5, Insightful)
by thePsychologist ( 1062886 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @08:27AM (#65960738)
Trust is more than just technical stuff. You actually have to have the right attitude. Pottering's pretentious and overconfident attitude already casts doubt that he can be trusted.