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

[12][13][14] His style has brought accusations that he is working against long-standing Unix philosophy,[15] which he addressed in his blog post The Biggest Myths.

[16] 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.

[20] In 2014 Poettering published an essay criticising how software in Linux distros is commonly packaged, updated, and deployed; and laid out proposals that he, Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack, Tom Gundersen and David Herrmann, had for how the architecture should be changed.

[22][23] 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.