Lennart Poettering

Lennart Poettering (born 15 October 1980) is a German software engineer and the original author of PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd.

Life and career

Poettering was born in Guatemala City but grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Hamburg, Germany. He then joined Microsoft. In 2026, Poettering left Microsoft to cofound Amutable, a company focused on integrity verification for Linux systems.

Since 2003, Poettering has worked on more than 40 projects, mostly written in C. He is the developer and maintainer of several free software projects which have been widely adopted by Linux distributions, including PulseAudio sound server (2004),

His style has brought accusations that he is working against long-standing Unix philosophy, For instance, Poettering has advocated speeding up Linux development at the expense of breaking compatibility with POSIX and other Unix-like operating systems such as the BSDs. 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 but ignoring the POSIX-specific parts. In 2014 Poettering published an essay criticising how software in Linux distros is commonly packaged, updated, and deployed; and laid out proposals for architecture changes, developed by himself, Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack, Tom Gundersen, and David Herrmann.

The controversy around systemd culminated in personal attacks and alleged death threats against Poettering. Poettering went on to put some blame on Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers for being bad role models for encouraging an abusive discussion culture on technical disagreements.