Agreed - what I meant was, in the long run, I expect that systemd will prove harmful to GNU/Linux in general, strategically.

Also FWIW, I like ESR a lot :) I'm mildly concerned about thread drift, but... why do you dislike him so?

He's an okay programmer, but he's got a frankly wacko political agenda (Ayn Rand, Libertarian, racism, paranoia etc.), he's mismanaged The Jargon File by putting in some of his own phrases which nobody else uses, and he's just an all-around unpleasant person.

Honestly, he's kind of worse than RMS, who is merely unpleasant to be around...

I agree on Rand and Libertarianism - although (as an Objectivist myself) it may interest you to know he's not an Objectivist, as he objects to several aspects of Rand's philosophy. I still have his suggested reading in that area on my TODO list.

But racism, and paranoia? I'd (seriously) like to see evidence of those if you have them. Nothing I have seen him write or do suggests he treats people in any way other than as individuals, on their merits alone.

Did you miss the blog article where he said a friend had told him that women were trying to have sex with OS leaders, so they could accuse them of rape?

Sounds pretty paranoid to me.

I might have been wrong about the racism stuff. I swear I saw some stuff, but I can't find it now, so I might have been confused with somebody else.

But at the end of the day, he's still an unpleasant person.