Kay Sievers, a well-known open-source software engineer, is a key developer of systemd, a system management framework for Linux-based operating systems. Sievers was banned by kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds for failing to fix an issue that caused systemd to interact with the Linux kernel in negative ways. Specifically, the command line entry “debug” ran both the base kernel’s debugging routine and that of systemd, potentially flooding some systems.

Torvalds fumed that Sievers lacked responsibility. Torvalds was tired of the fact that Sievers did not fix problems in the code Sievers wrote. This meant that the kernel then has to work around the problems he caused. Torvalds went on to state that “this has been going on for *years*,” and said that he will refuse to accept patches from Sievers until Sievers cleans up his act.

Systemd has not been flavour of the month in Linux land. Prominent contributors like Ingo Molnar, slamming the “excessively passive/aggressive” attitude of the project’s maintainers.