i am not surprised that he made this move quietly.
poettering's work attracted a disproportionate share of criticism, and moving to microsoft is not exactly a helpful move to quell that criticism. on the contrary, it will only get worse.
since he continues to work on systemd, critics will now start to decry systemd as being a microsoft product, or at least strongly influenced by microsoft. so this move is likely to strengthen the anti systemd camp. we'll see what comes from that.
As a person who doesn't like systemd a lot (yet doesn't hate it either), I find some of the criticisms well founded.
I've written them in the past, so I'll not re-iterate these walls of text, but all in all, systemd had to learn some things over and over just because it disregarded people's warnings about the problems some of these design patterns create.
Being a little agreeable and open to discourse is not a bad thing.
All in all, systemd makes different trade-offs w.r.t. design, and is not radically fast when compared to what's coming before that. Capability wise it made some things easier (not possible), and some things way more harder.
It's just another iteration. Hope he doesn't pulls another "De Icaza", and all goes well for him.
OTOH, I can't trust neither him, nor Microsoft, because I look actions rather than words.
What does "quietly" mean to you? It would be an exercise in conceit to broadcast such a move on social media with the assumption that people are interested, wouldn't it?
well, that's the question. how would such an announcement have been received?
i expect the response would not have been much different really, so the only difference is that the response happens several months after the move, which now makes it a fait accompli.
trying to put myself into poetterings shoes the difference to me would mean that, if questioned, i could talk more confidently about why i made the move, pointing at how it affected my work, instead of speculating about it. it would also give me time to acclimate myself to the new situation.
so keeping the move quiet simply makes it easier to deal with any negative responses.
poettering's work attracted a disproportionate share of criticism, and moving to microsoft is not exactly a helpful move to quell that criticism. on the contrary, it will only get worse.
since he continues to work on systemd, critics will now start to decry systemd as being a microsoft product, or at least strongly influenced by microsoft. so this move is likely to strengthen the anti systemd camp. we'll see what comes from that.