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Zynot Foundation Forks Gentoo
deque_alpha writes "The Gentoo Linux distribution has been forked by a group of Gentoo developers and community members. This fork is being placed under the control of the non-profit Zynot Foundation, which will "hold the source code, trademarks, and any other intellectual property developed by and for its community." The goals of the fork include improving stability and cross-platform reliability to bring the Gentoo-developed technology to the enterprise and embedded arenas." Another reader points out Zack Welch's long article at Zynot.org on reasons for forking the Gentoo distribution.
its better to be forked than knifed...
or did anybody else have to read that paragraph 3 times to get it? Maybe it's the beer but... oh wait.. yep, it's the beer.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
As a user of Gentoo on both a server and my home desktop, I understand that this could mean great things for the distribution, if executed properly. Hopefully the forkers will be able to keep up with the dynamic nature of the Gentoo community.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
floam, the hardened-gentoo project is still alive and has its own channel on freenode, #gentoo-hardened. It mainly consists of a kernel with only stable patches, IPSec, grsecurity or selinux (not both) and (if using IPSec) a profile to go with it. It's not a fork, just an enhancement upon Gentoo itself, hence the added profile and kernel sources. I've been using it on my router and it seems to be doing great, even with Gentoo's default SELinux policy.
Also, try their demo machine here. It's been mentioned as an article here before. It lets you log in as root and do almost nothing, which is pretty cool.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
So...how am I going to emerge the latest updates on my Gentoo handheld?
To me, it seems that the most useful part of Gentoo is their portage system. How can it be modified to support the embedded area without losing the features that make Gentoo Gentoo?
Well, I guess that's why they forked, isn't it?
Introduction
These words were written in an attempt to explain the reasons that factored into my decision to fork the Gentoo project and to provide a history lesson to all those that may come after me. I hope that, by sharing my recent experiences as an open source user, developer, and business owner, others will benefit from my insights if they someday find themselves embroiled in similar political throes. I will also attempt to explain what steps I then took to ensure that the technology was preserved for the community, and the technical problems we intend to solve by forming a new culture around an existing and explosively popular technology.
I have tried hard to make the following narrative as impersonal as possible and to convey the facts as objectively as possible; however, I must admit to the simple fact that my own intimate involvement with these events will have skewed my perception of them. As such, my attorneys and business advisors have also reviewed these words to ensure that my personal feelings neither cloud nor obviate the point that this story ultimately tries to make:
A major fork of the Gentoo Linux distribution was both necessary and inevitable.
I also attempt to help make some sense of the inherent conflicts that derive from the fundamental needs of users, developers, and businesses. Like the old notion that a company must balance its offerings between "better, faster, or cheaper", an open source project must similarly balance the needs of those funding the project, those working on the project, and of those individuals that the project ultimately serves - its users.
My Personal Story
I founded Superlucidity Services, LLC in August 2001 after quiting my job as System Software Architect for Tripod Data System. Before leaving, I was nearly entirely responsibly for the Windows CE software image for the Ranger handheld computer; I had a secure salary, nice benefits, and corporate resources galore that I gave up in order to instead start a company focused on developing and providing Linux solutions. I had heard "what else are you going to do?" in response to why developers used Microsoft products one too many times -- the answer was quite simple: "you quit your job and go work on what you believe might someday offer the world a better choice."
Over the course of a year, from June 2002 to June 2003, I invested my time, capital resources, and equipment in the following fashions:
Help advance the Gentoo Linux project's development goals by leading the Embedded Gentoo project
To establish a support contract that helped fund the project leadership through critical times
strengthen its IT infrastructure, and overall ensure the project's success
Despite (or perhaps even because of) these efforts, I was still left facing the inescapable conclusion that Gentoo could not continue to serve my needs as a user, developer, or business owner. This conclusion came from several inescapable facts:
A week after divulging my intent and plans to form a "Gentoo Devices" to Daniel Robbins (founder and majority owner of Gentoo Technologies, Inc.), he attempted to characterize my recent and substantial contributions as volunteer work instead of as a sweat equity investment.
Between these two phone conversations, the "gentooembedded.{org,net,com}" domain names were registered by Daniel, yet he subsequently informed my company that Gentoo had no immediate interest in pursuing the embedded market.
Gentoo Technologies, Inc. choose to form Gentoo Games (another for-profit), instead of forming a Gentoo Linux non-profit as had been discussed by the community. The formation of Gentoo Games was made in secret, without even consulting the developers that would be making it happen.
These are indicative of larger issues within the project, which affect the technologies ability to scale into the embedded and enterprise markets.
If these points have piqued your interest, my story, and how I chose to res
This is a serious question.
I want you to think about how much time has been spent and money and effort invested over the past (let's say) six years on the various Linux distributions. There are, what, half a dozen major ones, and maybe a dozen more niche or fringe ones?
Now think about how much further along Linux would have been if that time, money, and effort had not been squandered on dead ends.
Now think about how much time, money, and effort was spent on Gnome or KDE. Now think about how much further along Gnome or KDE could have been if nobody had wasted their time on the other one.
Now think about Gecko. Gecko, as a browser technology, is essentially dead. KHTML, thanks to Apple, rules the day. How much further along would KHTML be if nobody had wasted their time on Gecko? Or, if you prefer, how much more viable and advanced would Gecko be if nobody had wasted their time on KHTML?
Here we see what, to me, seems to be the ultimate failure of this thing you guys call "open source." What I'm referring to here is the development of large software projects by loose, unorganized confederations of hobbyists, students, and individuals; this is the phenomenon that has come to be known on Slashdot and in a few other places as "open source."
The ultimate failure of "open source" is this: everybody wants to have it his own way. Consequently, we have ten individuals or groups working on their own variations on X, instead of cooperating on X itself.
As a software engineering protocol, "open source" appears to be remarkably ineffective.
How can this be?
Opinions?
Oh god. That's really bad.
I read this guy's post in disbelief. At one point he says he has been contributing for a while because he believes in linux and gentoo, and at another he says that he expected his contributions to be treated as building some sort of long term path that would be financially beneficial to him. How can you write code, contribute it to a major GPL project, then not realize that your contribution is one of thousands, and that there is no major plan to reward individual contributors?
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
As a Gentoo user, this makes me feel much less enthusiastic about where this project is headed. Especially the shady practices of the guy in charge (particularly, trying to pass themselves off as a non-profit). I will probably go with the fork as soon as possible.
Then, on the very next page, he says this:
Whaaaa?
The day that I think to myself, "Hey, you know, this Gentoo thing looks pretty cool... Linux + FreeBSD style ports? What a sweet deal! Let's give it a whack...", this happens.
At the risk of generalizing the situation, I'll say that more often than not egos get in the way of something really freaking cool, and ain't that a pisser...
*sigh*
It's nice to see my intuition confirmed. Gentoo is the only community-run project of which I am aware that mostly ignores the community. Go read the posts at forums.gentoo.org...you'll see most of the developers (Especially Kurt Lieber) are arrogant and talk down to the users. You'll see many ignored ideas that make sense; it took about 6 months for anyone to pay attention to the scores of users who wanted updates from the developers, of this supposed "community" distribution and it took another couple of months before the Gentoo Newsletter was implemented...and it STILL doesn't really give people what they want, telling people the number of bugs found and squashed, rather than good info on what the bugs actually ARE.
Did I mention how arrogant the developers are? People who don't want to install 1.4 until it is final are looked down upon and told "it's just the installer, it's good enough." Well then, why not call 1.4 RCx "1.4 final" then, if it is "good enough?" People who suggest that new features shouldn't be added to a release candidate build are ignored. And this is not the first developer that has cried foul of Daniel Robbins. I don't know him personally so I can't say with authority, but I smell a rat.
The sad thing is, despite the horrendous developer beauracracy, it's still the best source-based distro out there. Hopefully this Zynot project will overtake it eventually. If there is more to it than spite towards DR, I think it will succeed.
Chris
It took me about 5 seconds to parse that headline and the first 3 images that went through my mind should not be mentioned in a PG rated forum...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
could be hypocritical. OTOH, getting a new distrib/fork off the ground I think requires a firm hand at first. After the first 6 months, though, participation should certainly open up...or else this is just sad and self-serving (which is fine, except some of the article tries to paint a little more altruistic picture)
This guy's so full of himself it's making my head spin. He seems to think that everybody should owe him dues for everything that is Gentoo. His documents are full of "my servers...", "me" this and "I" that. It honestly looks like he had a hissy fit and took his toys home because he wanted one of Gentoo's major focuses to be embedded systems, and the other developers said, "that's all nice and dandy, but we aren't really concerned too much about that for the moment...".
Sheesh. Some people...
and so on. This document implies that he himself could be removed from the board of directors once it is run completely by the community, although I doubt that would happen.
Heh, yep that's pretty cool, alright.
:P
I know that when I need to log into my servers as root, I definitely want to be able to 'do almost nothing'.
Setting your shell to nologin must be a real treat for you!
WOWEE!
I'll believe it when I see it.
Having read the reasons that the author provides for starting this fork of the project, it seems to me that this is just a result of personal disagreement. There is much bitterness involved in the arguments; indeed, the end(where he discusses the changes occuring in Gentoo) sounds like overconfidence in his importance. The author is convinced of his importance - everything that happens either happens because of him or to spite him. While I hope that the fork will allow him to focus on contributing to his project without constant worries about politics, I don't think highly of his reasons. There is far too many gaps in his story(why would he loose his developer status for a few suggestions? I'm sure there was major flaming involved) . . .
Gecko vs KHTML is an excellent example !
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Embedded systems are a place where linux can really succeed. I think this project could give Linux the boost it really needs to shine in the embedded market that is currently dominated by closed source operating systems. So.. I only hope for the best and this can only mean more, not less for Linux
http://nero-online.org
Gentoo is just another bunch of hackers wanting to make money. Just like Bill Gates and co was at one time. As to windows working, it only works because its best code was bought or cloned from real programmers, who for the most part learned to code UNIX or something else first just like Gates did. Microsoft cannot even claim the copyright to the use of the word Windows to refer to its own os.
As long as there is a Darwinian natural selection aspect to software,
ie; vapour ware is the norm, then the best will survive. Look to the rapid adoption of Linux outside the USA. The only conclusion is that the more distros of an os the better. For that matter the more operating systems likewise.
The hardware driver monopoly of MS is slowly coming to an end. As it does the truth about how shitty win XP really is will finally come out in public. If Gentoo survives to grab a piece of the action then it will make reasonable money.
The get rich quick days of writing crappy leaky spaghetti code ware and hole ridden firmware for Microsoft, then making millions selling it to braindead users are over. Thanks to GNU, Linux, and BSD.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Couple of days after Zynot forked from Gentoo :
a group of disgrunted Zynot users decided to
fork Zynot to Yznge platform. The users welcomed
this fork as it closes us to the ultimate
Wholy Grail of the Linux movement known as
"Linux distribution for everybody" meaning that
each person will have his/her own Linux distro.
Linux made another important step on the way
to the total world domination
"Ein Mann, Ein PC, Ein Linux distro" !!!
I posted on both message boards. I thought slashdot might be interested in my posts.
On forums.gentoo.org
----
I have read most of Zach's rant and it disturbs me. Much of what Zach is complaining about seems to be dealt with by the Gentoo top-level management structure proposal. However, the most important part of his claims, the "business" part, are not. I of course will hear D. Robbins out as well.
Regardless, I think the Gentoo project needs to CLEARLY establish what is bussiness and what is not. This should, hopefully, prevent these claims frum being made in the future.
The way I see it this whole affair is nothing but bad news. I hope and pray it all works out.
----
and on forums.zynot.org
----
I have read most of Zach's rant and it disturbs me. Much of what Zach is complaining about seems to be dealt with by the Gentoo top-level management structure proposal. However, the most important part of his claims, the "business" part, are not. I of course will hear D. Robbins out as well.
Regardless, I think the Gentoo project needs to CLEARLY establish what is bussiness and what is not. This should, hopefully, prevent these claims frum being made in the future.
The way I see it this whole affair is nothing but bad news. I hope and pray it all works out.
----
I will not sleep well tonight.
The Peoples' Liberation Front of Gentoo
All cry out: One Man! One Distro!
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I totally disagree, I think that every one of these cases you've specified has *benefitted* from the very competition that you're saying has harmed them.
Every Linux distribution was designed to fill a niche, every single one of them has a different take on how things are done. And every single one of them has the opportunity to learn from all the others. In terms of what to do, and what not to do.
I think the best example of this *is* Gnome and KDE. Both of these systems have a very different approach to solving the same problem. Both of them also have learned from and borrowed ideas off of the other one.
I love open source software for one simple reason: The choices I am able make in my computers look, feel, and behaviour. If I don't like KDE, I switch to GNOME. If GNOME is pissing me off, I'll play with Fluxbox.
Without the multiple competing options in the form of all these software projects/distributions, what would we have? We'd end up with ONE option that we'd have to use, whether we liked it or not, and no alternative to go to. Does that sound familiar? It's the situation I was in before I discovered there were other options to Windows.
I'm not going back to those dark days, not if I can help it.
Zy the hell not??
AOL
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
As to the "sweat equity" arguments I can only say that he submitted his code as a volunteer. If he was concerned about getting certian business considerations as a result of his work he should have taken it in writing.
One thing I was not certian of; did he loan or donate those servers he mentioned. If he loaned them I could see it being the nice thing to do to return them if he no longer feels comfortable lending them out.
We'll see how this all turns out a year or two from now. I doubt any useful information will come out of either side for a good couple of months. The sanatized reports are all we will get for a while, until later on enough secondary evidence tricles out for people to make their own decisions.
The Ro Factor - Jeep/Linux Weblog
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/ 9606
Gentoo requires lots of donated hosting and bandwidth. The amount of resources used in rsync alone must be huge. Where is this guy going to get the backing to make this even feasible?
Agreed. I am no debian zealot, but I strongly believe that volunteer-driven OS's are a better idea. Motives aren't under question (well, at least to a lesser extent), and the bottom line doesn't interfere with things.
I never mentioned anything about the way the community acts as a whole. It was more in reference to the way it has grown and probably will continue to grow, as well as how it responds to certain events in conjunction with Gentoo innovation, such as this.
I posted a Gentoo comment here because the article is about Gentoo! I agree that Gentoo and its community both have shortcomings. And I also believe that Slackware, Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, etc. all have similar shortcomings, both in community and in software. Linux is like that right now, and will be until it stabilizes. No matter what distribution you're a fan of, you can never claim that your favorite is better than the other ones. That won't accomplish a thing.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
The idea of a different distro for every user is not as far fetched as one might think. If the os install process could itself be forked! I personally use several different linux and bsd installs to do different things, on my Slack, I use gcc, make, etc, on Redhat I use office software. On BSD I use file manipulation with Vi, and take care of all my disks and do the dd nasties. Booting multiple stripped down operating systems is great, the speed for purpose advantage is considerable.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
You might be a troll, but you serve much better as a devil's advocate.
I don't think you're looking at this quite right.
The "failure" of open source is that everybody wants it their own way, perhaps, but you should look more seriously at what that means. They want any piece of software they want to work with whatever hardware they've got as well as possible. There really isn't anything wrong with that. Shouldn't this be the case?
This has been a HUGE problem in the past.
There was no way to make any piece of software work well without hurting some other piece. You want easy installation? Then you won't be able to optimize. You want to optimize? Then configuration will not be easy.
The problem is not choice, it's flexibility. Autoconfig did a lot to ensure that flexibility, and this "fork" is another step in that direction. I put fork in quotation marks because it is quite likely that a lot of the material in the fork will go back to the original. At least, I really, really hope so. Otherwise, there are certainly going to be people switching back and forth between the two distros. Gentoo is designed with flexibility in mind, and it is becoming more flexible as time goes on, so this is quite feasible. Haven't you heard how much Gentoo steals from other distros?
Here's a better question than yours.
How much farther along would your distro be if all open source software was easily accessable to it? How much farther would it be if someone could create packages for your distro that come from a different distro, processor, or even kernel?
That seemed to be ZWelch's concerns when I talked to him on #gentoo-embedded last.
One final note: in case you're thinking that something like this is just another development thing, note that Zachary Welch was the lead embedded group developer. This is going to be a distro with advanced cross-compilation capabilities, an area which is rather undeveloped (anywhere in the open source world) at the moment.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You miss the point, though. The true admin of the server can still do whatever he wants, by authenticating with the SELinux policy system. Even if the server gets rooted, it's all for naught without being able to authenticate with SELinux. If you understand anything about security, you know how valuable that can be for a system that needs hardcore security.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
The ultimate failure of "open source" is this: everybody wants to have it his own way. Consequently, we have ten individuals or groups working on their own variations on X, instead of cooperating on X itself.
/.'ers will learn something from this (other than not to feed the trolls).
I'm almost ready to call troll on this one, but I figure I can answer this question yet once again and perhap it will stave off other similar comments.
First off: What is this "open source" you speak of? There is NO centralized, organized open source movement, despite what ESR might claim. There are may individuals and groups creating and producing open source software, yes. But they are widely varied in goals, scope, and success. Many (most?) produce open source software on their own time and on their own terms. That's certainly the case for me. It's a hobby. It's a fun thing to do. And no one is going to tell me I have to cooperate with so and so just to make sure open source software succeeds. I'm doing this for fun, remember? So if I want to create my own Yet Another Linux Distribution (YALD?) or whatever, then it's my choice, particularly since I'm doing this on my own free time!
"Open source" describes a software licensing model and, I suppose, a development model as well (not really) but certainly not a "software engineering protocol." Extreme Programming is a development model. Open source is a licensing model. It is not a grand movement. It is not a single entity bent on taking over software development. Sure there are some open source developers and free software developers with these ideas, but they do not necessarily represent the whole of the "community."
In other words, look at your comment this way:
The ultimate failure of "human society" is this: everybody wants to have it his own way. Consequently we have ten individuals or groups working on their own various on X, instead of cooperating on X itself.
Okay, yeah, so it was a troll, but it's a common misunderstanding too. Hopefully a few
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Then perhaps this is one of the unspoken victories of the GNU liscence. Rather than squabbling over whether the man's work was some form of unpaid volunteer labor, he is free to take his efforts and start his own camp. Neither side suffers from debilitating lawsuits, and hopefully the two can coexist peacefully.
In truth this is not particular to the merits of GNU. Any project run with a public source repository allowing use to the public benefits from this. What is truely interesting is the general lack of forks, and of those forks that do exist, the frequency that they "consolidate." I've said it before but observing OSS projects often seems like watching Communist Russia. The software is liberated, but control is wrest over the 'common' source code. This code repository was referred to by ESR as a form of cathedral, where design is king, but I see it as more of a beuocracy, where people are sent in recursive loops to submit patches for application. Marx suggested the idea of the proletariot dictatorship, but in practice Stalin felt that the proletariot required a Leader. Such is the role of the Maintainer. But Orson Wells probably did a better job with Animal farm than I can do with OSS. I do not mean to disparaige the GNU liscence by calling it Communistic, but simply that often large projects like Gentoo (and BSD) suffer from this wrest for control.
In conclusion I wish the Zynot group luck in this quirky fork, and hope that he can find a solid niche outside of x86 and PPC as he claims.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Random Guy: Why'd you make a fork off Gentoo?
Ex-Gentoo Devel Guy: Zynot?
You must be a Gentoo user. You sure act like one. Do me a favor and don't let people know you are a debian user. I wouldn't want people to accidentally make any sort of connection between us.
How about forking the Linux kernel source tree while you are at it and give something good like kqueue? :)
-- oh.... so..... sleeeeeepy.
On forums.gentoo.org:
And on forums.zynot.org:
I mean, gee whiz, guys, am I really supposed to take these personality conflicts seriously? GNU wins either way.
I'll be sleeping pretty well tonight...
Mozilla version 1.4.5.3.5.78b released? ... `You know as soon as I saw that I "emerged" gentoo, and boy you know only 47 hours later, I see the new mozilla, and I can feel the 1% speed improvement I get by compiling from source, I don't know what I'd do without it, I'd just die, it's so great, boy you know, I just love gentoo!'
I can see it going two ways --
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Open source is driven by market forces. If Gentoo makes sense, people will continue to use it. If this new effort makes sense, people will start using it. If either organization violates open source licenses, they can kiss their business model goodbye. It's no big deal.
As for all the personal stuff, well, people need to think about ahead of time what they are investing their time in and what they are going to get out of it. In the business world, all you get is what is guaranteed to you contractually in writing (or by law). So, don't spend time developing open source software expecting that some profit or job will magically materialize. Either develop open source software under contract, or do it for fun or as a volunteer.
Read down this guy's article and you'll find he's planning to rewrite portage in C or C++ - better for the embedded market. I'm not convinced that'll go down too well with a lot of people (currently it's written in Python).
I actually expected this. A project as brilliant as
Gentoo was probably going to follow in the footsteps
of FreeBSD. So now they have their Guido. Big
surprise. It's kinda like how The Smashing Pumpkins
did/do/whatever nothing but fight nonstop, but put
out goodness. Same thing goes for The Pixies until
they broke up in 91. You need those premadonna's
though. They fire up everyone else enough by either
inspiration or plain pissing them off to get to the
really interesting aspects of people. People end up
doing things that they never expected. Like say,
donating 5 machines for the cause. You need people
with these questionable methods and morals running
the show. A blowjob in the oval office happens.
Look how great openbsd is. I'm from the school of
UNIX where Admins were Gods. You treated them like
gold. Heads of other departments kissed your ass
or you didn't do shit for them. Sometimes I really
miss those days *sniff!*. You can argue til you
are blue in the face that you can't run a business
that way. Those fat smelly hippy geeks didn't
deserve those huge salaries and aerialon chairs
and insane levels of power, but is it really
better now? Open Source projects are one of the
last places someone that wants to get their
power on can find refuge. It's one of the few
places they can get the loyalty and admiration
they feel they rightly deserve for being the
type of God necessary to pull of the types of
things necessary to make something as stunningly
beautiful as Gentoo. Let them have their lame
tantrums. Let them play God and cuss people out
and ignore the lusers. As long as they keep doing
the kinds of things that will allow them to get
away with it. I, for one, miss the stuck up
asshole admin/coder/developer. He was always
a great friend as long as you were clueful and
didn't ask stupid fucking questions you could find
the answer too in 5 minutes on your own. If we
didn't live in a culture the constantly rewarded
mediocrity and scorned intelligence, they wouldn't
act that way because they wouldn't have too.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Yeah, I think the original board of ICANN said something similar. We all know how that turned out.
Game... blouses.
I would not trust any single person to lead a distribution of this size
I wonder how Patrick Volkerding feels about that comment since slackware comes out way ahead of Gentoo in every poll of how many people are using what distributions.
Ascii artist &
REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He's over there.
P.F.J.: Splitter!
OK, bye bye karma...
This is a really great strategy. While the rest of the industry consolidates, we Linux'ers will start forking and flood the market with too much choice!
Seriously though, this is my greatest concern about Linux. Are we just recreating unix wars? Already, there is *significant* variance amongst different linux distros, even ignoring forking those. Argue against this all you want. The fact of the matter is that anyone writing to Linux needs to do a lot of testing/QA to have any confidence that their software will work on distro X version Y. Unless like 99.9% of our community, you want to just throw some source up and hope that an *end user* can 'make' it.
Major distros have a competitive reason for having other distros fork. Divide and conquer is a sound principle. The more distros there are, the more it forces you to pick the top X.
Not to mention that Microsoft must love this kind of behaviour: "Man, here we were worrying about them, and they fscked themselves!".
Personally, I think there may be some funky logic behind using some of the principles behind JCP. You specify a version of Linux* like J2EE that's made up of a particular version of common component technologies. 'Scuse my ignorance if United linux is doing/trying to do the same.
Differentiation and innovation is cool, but it is happening at the very core of Linux* itself, forcing people who write software to make choices that are as good as proprietary (I write to distro X). Man, flame me and pick this apart all you want, but I'm *really* trying here.
*Correct, I incorrectly use teminology to talk about not 'Linux the kernel' but 'Linux the kernel + other things'.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
In keeping with the immensely derivative naming conventions of open source projects, I suggest Jenthree. Or Kaytu. Or Lindows.
First, I think it best that we keep the hype beat back and focus on the facts-- namely that this is apparently a not-so-core contributor that has issues with Gentoo's direction and Gentoo's directors; the very same directors that managed to architect a distro that the principle plaintif is so very fond of. Second, persons that pick up gentoo because it's bleeding edge tech, implementing god knows what next ( hardened, ppc port that blows the dedicated ppc distros away, ... ), go on to complain that th e developers are not responsive to user requests. What I'm getting here is that these guys have a vision and that their implementing their vision as they best see fit. Personally, I amazed at what they've accomplished and I'd like that they keep on keeping on. For sometime now, my impression has been that Gentoo is building a solid base, something is that is fundimental if they're to go on to compete in the commercial, supported playground. If developers have their hands and heads full don't expect a quick response to feature requests.
Finally, after (I guess) batting for Gentoo above, I think only those in comprising the core of the Gentoo development teams know what complaints have validity and what complaints do not, and I hope ,for the sake of gentoo, valid complaints are addressed.
*$ sudo emerge aspell (sorry)*
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts." - Henry A
Disclaimer; I'm not a Gentoo user, or even a daily user of any Linux-distro. Partly this is because I 'grew up' on Windows, partly because I've mostly been more interested in what I do on my PC than with what OS is on the bottom. However, I've been playing a lot with Knoppix lately, and are considering moving to Linux when I upgrade my computer later this year.
Reading the articles posted, and the 'reply' that was posted slightly higher up in the comments, I feel that this is but a reflection of what is the largest problem, and yet one of the great strenghts, of open source operating systems: They are dependant of the 'personal chemistry' between the various contributers. If they fall out, as it has clearly happened in this cause, the distrebution can suffer near fatal wounds (if he pulls all the hardware he says he has loaned to the project, I think things can get messy for a while). On the other hand, we might see two good (or even great) distributions where there only was one before.
The articles also raises a number of valid points which should be taken to heart by all who contribute to open source software; unclear roadmaps, unclear lines of command, hard to get a descission made, lack of communications. While these issues are found in closed source operations as well, it is easier to combat them in that area as they are traditionaly more hirarcical in their organisation.
Oh well, one more distro to consider when I take the leap into using Linux as my main OS
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
I think this fork is just normal because nature of Gentoo give you chance to do forks easly.
Personally I don't give any chance to zynot. Other source based distors not successfull as Gentoo. Also Debian has source based instalation. But it seems not interested by people.
So I predicted. Later or sooner. Gentoo like services are offered by all other Major distors. Because nature of GNU/Linux requires this.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
From Monty Python's "Life of Brian"
REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He's over there.
P.F.J.: Splitter!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
sounds just like the LRP guy from the other day...Bitter because his expectations were not met because you can't control what other people do. Why does this guy feel the need to bring this political BS out into the public just because he had a disagreement w/ the lead developer? Because he just wants attention...
Its a shame this even ended up on slashdot, but people who know about Gentoo and Daniel Robbins nature won't be influenced by this crap. If you read Daniel's response, you'll know what I mean. He isn't even going to come down to this guy's level. He wants to fork off? Fine. But no need to get political or personal about it.
Gentoo just works. Thats why people use it. And, because people know and respect the amazing work and documentation that Daniel Robbins has given to the Linux community. I paid for Gentoo, but it was a voluntary donation.
I'm one of those silent users of Gentoo. I have Gentoo running on roughly 4 dozen production servers to date, with another 170 or so waiting their conversion from Debian, Redhat, SuSE, BSDs, etc. I've used just about everything under the sun, but I find Gentoo to be the very best as what it is - a Linux distribution that is, in effect, my own. I have a standard server installation on a new box down to 10 minutes of my time from a remote connection. I couldn't ask for more.
As for Mr. Welsh's comments, they seemed very personal to me, and I would suggest this isn't the best way to kick things off. I hope he can leave his personal issues aside and concentrate on the fork if that is what he believes is the best solution for him. Good luck to him.
Please choose a better name.. Zynot sounds like "snot" and a word with a "not" as an ending brings negative connotations.
How old is this Daniel Robbins guy anyway? He acts like an obnoxious brat. Well, typical geek.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Just how many levels of authentication make 'hardcore security'?
> and cross-platform reliability
:(
If that finally means an ISO image for the alpha plattform and _woking_, stable and halfway recent portages, then I am all for it.
Right now, besides the stone-old debian, alpha seems to be petty dead on linux
Which is a shame, since gxx-3.2+ really brought advantages for C++ based apps on axp. Roumours are, even KDE does now compile, though I haven't tested (yet).
He's invited us all round to his house! Let's all go together - bring your own beer. This friday, 8pm. Does anyone have his address?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
... he knows how to seem the classier one, no?
Good plan. You'll make more money by subverting it to many for-profit interests.
Are you looking for an exciting, no holds barred hardcore Linux distribution? Then, my friend, look no further. AdjectiveNoun Linux is the distribution ("distro") you're looking for!
We have only the most cutting edge features such as:
* The 2.4.21 kernel
* A packaging system
* gcc
* Support for USB, CD-ROM's, *and* IDE hard drives!
When you're looking to rip it up, there's no better place to start than AdjectiveNoun Linux. Come download our 650MB ISO today. Burn it next week. Brag about your install tomorrow. www.adjectivenounlinux.com/en/download/
I suppose the whole point of creating Linux was arrogance in the first place too?
And if I want to compile from source, and love the ports system? I can think of no distro that seems to piss people off the way Gentoo does. Why is that? Is it Debian people feeling threatened or something (see the 'Are we losing users to Gentoo' thread in one of the Debian NG:s for some arrogant opinions)? Why not let people use Gentoo if they like it?
Meep.
"Rosebud..."
1) Competition is a strength and, in most cases, remarkably effective. Markets that are monopolized move very slowly becuase there's no reason to move on. Capitalism relies on this, too.
2) Look at KDE, and how bloated it is (I know it's an opinion, but there is truth based on it). Think of how hard it would be to satisfy low-end-system users, minimalists, people who run mission-critical systems that need a GUI, but can't be bothered with fancy... anything. Think of how hard it would be to combine the flexibility of a from-scratch distro and the user-friendliness of Mandrake with the manageability of Debian.
3) Open source programming isn't all about multitudes of choices in all situations. Only end-user applications typically feature choices up the wazoo (and distros... but that's an "end-user" kind of thing too). If you look underneath, the graphics system (almost entirely X), standard libraries, etc. are standard. Once something becomes mature and truly useful to be used generally everywhere, it is.
4) You can always use Windows, the land of very few choices. Interfaces, 1. Popular and mature file navigation, 1. Kernel, 1. As a software engineering protocol, open-source is remarkably effective at creating a lot of high-quality choices. How can this be?
Daniel Robbins's reply reads like it was written by the Iraqi Information Minister...
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Yes it's true, the tone of the developpers on the gentoo forums is really superior, feels like "hey, we let you use what we code, so shut it" kinda attitude.
The users themselves, and some of the moderators, are quite friendly and helpful, even with the newbies that ask questions that could be answered with the "search" function of the forums.
Quite frankly, I use Gentoo because I liked the idea behind portage and the USE flags, and also because of the installation documents, which are -still- one of the best and clear step-by-step piece of information.
This fork, and all this bitterness that suddenly emerges (pun intended) like that just proves that something was wrong right from the start with the way they managed themselves (the developpers)
I'll stick with the original flavor atm, see what kind of community the fork (zynot ???) will be supported by.
Granted, Gentoo has this "13yo script kido" eliteness to it, but part of the community is really helpful, the install process makes you learn a lot about Linux itself, and well, it's a very clean distro, configuration wise. No doubt about it.
Music is the language of the heart, the sound of the soul. -Joe Satriani
So you mean that this is Gentoo for embedded systems... Hmmm I can see it now-
Me: What're you doing buddy ?
Zaurus chap: Umm nothing... I "emerge"ed a calendar app yesterday... just 5 more files to compile
- mritunjai
Since when was Debian a source distro ?
Debian *.deb packages are compiled for the lowest common denominator, namely i386.
In other news, due to recent SCO claims RMS is setting up GNU/HurdLEs (Limited Edition) for linux user to switch to.
> Without the multiple competing options
The important thing is: What you describe are cooperating options, not competing ones!
The original
The fork
Thats just the two versions of XFree86, I havn't even bothered to include any commercial X servers (E.g. Metro, Sun etc.)
I tend to agree and think this is a good move.
Gentoo has crappy management. Don't get me wrong. Good idea and well thought out, Daniel. But it's time you retire or come down to being a developer because in the end all you are is a selfish, egoistic, self-centered moron.
I am an ex-Gentoo developer myself.
Yay! at last!
:)) the day before the conference started, among us were a very cool guy that used to be one of the main Gentoo developers, but had quit recently; and another hacker that was still trying to get some work done, but was growing tired of dealing with drobbins.
:)), and someone with a dedicated server for hosting was found...
:( )
;)]
Funny to see this happen now, almost two years ago, even before Gentoo 1.0 was released, at the FOSDEM I meet with a bunch of hackers to drink some beer(Tea for me, thanks
After much ranting about the problems the project was suffering and drobbins complete incompetence, a fork was suggested by someone(can't recall who), a few names were discussed ("genthree" I think was one
Sadly the idea never got anywhere, I guess mainly because everyone was too busy with other things, and I lost touch with all them(I was hopping to meet them again in FOSDEM this year, but work got in my way and I couldn't make it.
Still, after the meeting, it was clear that a good percentage of the Gentoo developers were really unhappy with the current leadership, and that it was just matter of time for something like this to happen.
I really wish them good luck, and maybe I will look into switching to the new distro from Debian Sid(that so far has been "Good Enough"(tm), but could use some improvements) and I hope all the 31337 h4x0rs keep using Gentoo, and don't come to bother the nice people that is forking.
It was sad to see some really good ideas and good quality work wasted because leadership sheer incompetence(anyone remembers drobbins rants about commercial distros "not contributing" "fixes" back to the mainline kernel? no that must have been embarrassing) and a user base that was mainly formed by clueless idiots that thought that Gentoo was the Mandrake of the 21th century("Hey dude, how cool I am! my box is so super-optimized! muhahaha...")
To the fork: good luck! to drobbins: have fun crashing in hell!
[posted anonymously to protect the identity of the confabulators
\\K
P.S.: DISCLAIMERS: I'm a Debian (l)user, and ex-BSD-zealot(still have a few BSD boxes around), and over time I have got really tired of solving the problems of clueless Gentoo (l)users in IRC, not to mention listening to their stupid rants about how 'optimized' their distro is, while they can't even use vi to edit a fucking file.
It's not about authentication.
SSH to selinux.dev.gentoo.org as root, with the password of gentoo.
Now try and do anything nasty. You (hopefully) can't. You're already root. But there is an extra set of patches that limit the power that root has, which effectively means that even if your box gets rooted, the attacker can't do anything, replace system binaries, etc. Which is shown in this box by allowing everyone to log in as root.
Get your own free personal location tracker
... they are just imitating the forking daemons.
;-)
AFAIK FreeBSD forked NetBSD which is geared towards embedded devices (and other obscure hardware
This is just Gentoo doing the same with Zynot.
Pass on,
Nothing new beneath the sun.
Not that I usually reply to a well written flame
:)
from an anonymous coward but,
You actually made an excellent counterpoint to my
"sympathy for the fucking geek bastards" post as
you so eloquently put it. The attitude you have is
precisely the reason so many high quality people,
by my definition anyway, are out of work.
They are replaced by the people that pass the HR
litmus test. It used to be that a real UNIX
department told HR they were hiring people and HR
went along with it because they realized they had
no clue how to decide who was good and who wasn't.
Then with the tech market disaster, PHB's and
other non-technical managers were able to take
advantage of the situation by making sure that
only a certain type of person would make it into
their tech department ranks. No more individuals.
Instead, cookie cutter personnel. Fine young
republicans that would have the important
qualities you look for in an employee like good
Caddy skills and the ability to shine shoes and
do cost-benefit analysis and make a good pot of
coffee when told to do so. They gave HR complete
power. HR was thrilled because it was easy for
them to weed out the 'undesirables' and pick the
finest yes men out of the wind driven drifts of
resumes coming in. So now we have exactly what
you said. Admins, coders, and developers that do
"EXACTLY what they are told". So when marketing
comes up with some shit insane idea that will
never work and is doomed to fail, they will do
the best they can AND take the blame when it does
fail because that's what they are supposed to do.
And they will get their skinny asses fired. That's
the way things work now. Is that really better?
When the "pimple farming pork vacuum assholes"
(pork vacuum is fucking hilarious btw, I'm
stealing it) were in charge of the IT departments
of the world, they'd be very vocal about stupidity
coming from the non-tech elite. Now it doesn't
matter. IT is the guinea pig cum scapegoat for
a lot of companys. They can always fire the whole
department and outsource to india. In the end,
the company that comes up with the middle road
between my argument and yours is the one that
will succeed. There just aren't very many out
there doing much more than taking advantage of
the current tech decline by seriously underpaying
half-talented suite wearing yes men that will
do what they are told and self destruct and
fall on their swords like good corporate lapdogs.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
This story is a cautionary tale for anyone looking to exploit commercial opportunities in open source: always remember that community is community, and business is business.
The Zynot founder made a mistake: he expected the community leadership to support his efforts "to capitalize from my significant sweat equity contributions to the project". In the absence of a business contract, all open source contributions are volunteer work -- that's why they're called "communities" and not "start-ups" or "incubators". This holds true whether the contributor is a major organization (like IBM) or an individual volunteer.
This is not to say that the Zynot founder is behaving badly by forking Gentoo. In fact, forking is the ultimate right granted by open source.
In an ideal world, perhaps, there would have been a way for the Gentoo leadership and for the Zynot group to work off the same codebase in a symbiotic relationship. It appears that MySQL AB is able to acheive that to some degree. But, as the JBoss group split demonstrates, sometimes business interests do not fit well within a community framework.
I suppose two lessons come from this:
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
I'll bet you laugh when you scan the radio and hear NPR begging for money. :-)
Seriously though, he's not expecting someone to send him a check for contributing, he's expecting a product that will enable him to sell services. That's the long-term path.
I can't sell a Linux machine to a company and keep the loot I would normally give to Microsoft if the product isn't good, can I?
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I stopped contibuting to gentoo thanks to drobbins and the devs power control fetish.
If there was no competition then there is uniformity and stagnation. In the closed source commercial world, competition happens all the time and the results generally come down to $. It is harder to 'fork' a closed source project because of IP.
In the open source world, projects also can and should compete. The grounds for comeptition may be functionality, the development community or even just general coolness. Because IP issues don't exist to the same degree, projects borrow code and ways of doing things all the whole time.
Each 'failure' is also a success because people can learn from picking over the bones of dead projects. This just isn't possible with closed source.
There may well be good grounds for parallel implementations. In the end it comes down to taste. I like Gnome but she prefers KDE, who is right? There are many ways to cross a river, and each may have their preference as regards boat bridge or swimming.
See my journal, I write things there
Nuts! I'm going to have to correct my own post. I can't believe "it's" when I should have used "its."
Because you don't know which ends are dead until you try them?
Think of it as evolution in action: Generate a whole bunch of new ideas, the ones that don't work out get discarded, the survivors spawn off many variants. Lather, rinse repeat.
Linus has stated that he has no master plan. This is good. As the evolutionary biologists keep saying: dumb, brute force, try 'em all evolution is smarter than you are.
In general, open source does a lot more trial-and error than commercial software. In the log run, this is good.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Long live the Gentoo Liberation Peoples' Front!
Who cares if there's multiple projects going on?
That'll give you choice. Plus, all the code is available. So if Joe working on GNOME thought of some nifty implementation for Anti-Aliasing, and Steve working on KDE thinks Joe's implementation is good, he can just cut-and-paste the code and make some modifications to make it work.
Duplication of effort does occur, but it does in the proprietary software world as well (it's called competition or aka capitalism). So your post, in my opinion, is just a troll.
"Linux developers have finally succeeded in creating a "self-forking" Linux distribution. Approximately every 3-8 months, the code will spontaneously fork into a new distribution, this creating more choices for users of Linux. This, apparently, has been the goal of Linux all along." ---- Seriously, folks, does the world need another Linux distro? Possibly I am not well-versed enough in Linux internals to understand how this variant is *truly* unique... but I thought that the whole friggin' point of Linux is that you have the source code and some fancy compile-time config params, so you can basically include/exclude any component that you want!!!!? This means you can create a light, embedded version... or a full-blown server. All from the same source code. What is it with the Penguin-clan and all of their distributions? Quit diluting the value of a great idea, people. Linux is a fantastic thing, but if you would just take the time to focus on one, two, or even three distros then things would move forward a lot faster.
Isn't the very thing that he's complaining about, that the main Gentoo project was taking 'his stuff' and without compensating him for it, The very same thing that he has just done to Gentoo?
i.e. Yes, he may have donated several machines to the project, and some specific coding related tot eh ARM branch, but what about the parts that really make gentoo what it is, like, say portage, the boatloads of prepatched kernels for things like grsecurity, selinux, vanilla, etc. I could check again, but I don't remember seeing his name anywhere.
Seems to me it went like this:
-drobbins- Wanna help?
-zach- sure, but I want financial compensation for everything I do
-drobbins- Well, this gentoo thing makes money, but let's face it, it's a linux distro, and it's not a whole lot of money.
-zach- *GASP*! Fine, I'm taking all my stuff and forking your distro!
Am I missing anything? (flame away)
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
(disclaimer: I only skimmed the article, but hey, it was long.)
This guy looks like the guy who was doing the Linux Router Project. He started it because of intrest in Linux and open source, but his long-term plan was to make some money. Although LFS was killed, and Gentoo forked, they seem to have the same, might I say bitter, thought that because they were doing something they *must* be paid.
I don't know whether its a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, its more people coming and helping the open source movement. But then again, its exactly not what made the Linux kernel popular: Linus made the kernel for fun, not profit, and it soared. I can only imagine what's going to happen to this company...
Orange
The same can be said of the space program...if only the russians and americans worked together we would have gotten to the moon by 1950!
That's crap, competition stems innovation.
-- What it is, jive-turkey!
Zynot Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Zynot at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Zynot makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Zynot is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Zynot because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Zynot."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Zynot." .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Zynot Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." .rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Zynot is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Zynot in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
-
P.S.: DISCLAIMERS: I'm a Debian (l)user, and ex-BSD-zealot(still have a few BSD boxes around), and over time I have got really tired of solving the problems of clueless Gentoo (l)users in IRC, not to mention listening to their stupid rants about how 'optimized' their distro is, while they can't even use vi to edit a fucking file.
:)
:)
Heh. I used LFS and Slackware for quite a while, then tried out Gentoo. I really like it, but why the hell isn't vi included in the base install? Nano? NANO!?
I'm using Gentoo on all my systems, but after I do an emerge world, the next step is emerge vim
On another note, if you're going to use Gentoo, you should try LFS first so that Gentoo seems easier
Vote for global prefs bug
I think the opinion-point in your argument is:
As a software engineering protocol, "open source" appears to be remarkably ineffective.
Question being: ineffective for whom?
If a person likes fooling around and spending his time that way, then yeah: he's performing mental masturbation. Maybe that's all he wanted. Maybe scratching his itch, with the expectation that someone else will be helped, hadn't even crossed the coder's mind.
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
Good point...
.doc format, very few new features, buggy, and insecure. And also because of the monoculture we also have silly viruses running through the email systems.
Lets go back in history a couple years:
Why do we need three or four major word processors. We've got Word Perfect, Microsoft Office, and Lotus Smart Suite.
Back to now:
We currently have a monoculture of office suites. When we had competition we had ~$200 office suites, able to import documents, and innovation in office software. Look at what we have now. ~$500+ for MS Office, document lock in through
Do you see the problem?
Now, in the open source world we also have another force at work which causes forks (Not ego as you might expect): motivation and application. Everyone has a different motivation behind the work they do. Some want one particular end result of their software, while another group may have a completely different result they are working towards.
KDE I think is great for folks newly coming into Linux, especially on high powered machines. I don't use KDE though, I use WindowMaker since it is much lighter weight. I like OpenOffice.org since it is fairly mature at this point even through its footprint is quite large. However, there are parts of KOffice that are useful for other folks.
Now, I know you are a troll here, but you mention ideas that not everyone understands. Some folks might think you were being insightful, but trollish is more like it.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
Why do we need AMD when all the employees for that company could work for Intel?
Why do we need Apple, Novell, and Sun when they could just work for Microsoft?
Why don't all the computer manufacturers just merge with Dell?
Why did MS make their own database when they could've just used Oracle?
Why do we have a Barnes and Nobles and Borders book stores when we already had a Waldenbooks?
Why a Wendy's and Burger King when they could've just gone with McDonalds?
Why do we have different brands of milk, eggs, butter, noodles, and other foods?
Why didn't Pepsi come about when we already had Coke?
AT&T was already our nation's phone carrier, so why did Sprint and MCI form?
Capitalism seems to be remarkably ineffective. Perhaps we should just have one central authority running all this stuff... I hear they tried that in Russia once. I wonder how that worked out.
I've read Zack Welch's reason for forking and I thing he has made a good decision for him.
Hope he'll manage to set up a coherent system/organization where people feel confortable contribuing to.
Anyway, by the end of the article, I had started wondering whether my "investment" in Gentoo was mislead; I contribute ebuilds, and not an insignificant amount of time submitting bug reports, and so on. What if the leaders of Gentoo were sitting in a dark, smoky room somewhere, secretly making hoards of cash off my labors and contributions?? Yegods! I could be being ripped off!
After the initial wave of panic, I got to thinking about it: I don't really care what people are doing with Gentoo. I use Gentoo because I believe it is the best distribution; they keep my most important packages up-to-date, Gentoo is easy to administer, and they have at least the illusion of being an open community. Nothing they're doing is hurting me, I'm running Gentoo on three or four machines, and I don't pay anything to use it. In fact, I consider my contributions to the project to be my "payment". If "they" can figure out a way of making money off their efforts, and it doesn't impact my use of Gentoo, then more power to them.
Now, if I were Zach, and I'd contributed that much time and effort, I'd probably be pissed too. At some level of contribution, you sort of expect to be included in the reaping of whatever nebulous profits are being gleaned. I think it is probable that Daniel, et al, are acting unethically -- being unwilling to acknowledge someone else's significant contributions is bad form (old chap) -- so at this point I wouldn't trust Daniel as far as I could throw him, but ultimately, it has little bearing on my use of Gentoo.
Personally, I think commercial software is doomed; software engineering will still be profitable, but it'll be more as service/support/specialized solutions providers. That's not very germane to the discussion, except that in my hypothetical future, throwing away the talent of a willing, and proven, contributor is like throwing away money.
I wish Zach luck.
Debian forked with the release of Progeny, which was basically a user-friendly commercial Debian. The fork was great, but didn't last. This is history repeating itself.
Another distro.
JUST what linux needs.
wahahahaa
He's disgruntled by the fact that noone is using BSD, and he's fishing for more users.
May *BSD rest in piece.
xwin.org is not an X fork as you claim.
Maybe next time you should RTF page you choose to link to:
That doesn't really look like an X fork, does it?
I thought I had found the perfect Linux distro.. And now its forking..
These kind of politics in the cooler linux distros sometimes make me want to go back to RedHat..
If I don't like KDE, I switch to GNOME. If GNOME is pissing me off, I'll play with Fluxbox.
ready for the desktop...
mmmhmmm
If you look at Gentoos screenshots, you will notice one, with a flag of israel (one of the main developper is from there).
I wrote an email to drobbins saying, that it probably is unwise to show any political signs on his webpage.
The answer was something like, it represents the linux comunity of israel and therefore is not political.
(Weeks later I told my brother about this conversation, and he as well had (independently) sent an email to drobbins having quite a long discussion afterwards.)
When I read their emails, I wanted to remove my Gentoo from my computer, but finally decided not to let _one_ person be the reason to remove a working system.
For the record, I would have written the same email if it was _any_ other flag!
Oh great, another forking Linux distribution.
While they're at it, perhaps they can write yet another forking window manager.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
How about, I wonder how Linus feels about that comment since he is in charge of deciding what does and does not go into the kernel used by all of these distributions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's done more for distribution-independent binaries than the LSB ever did.
So who makes the critical changes? They have to authenticate in some fashion, correct? If there is a means to obtain absolute power, it's just another layer of authentication. Break the outer ring by hacking root on the server then break the inner ring by hacking the authentication method provided by selinux. It's just another layer.
While the extra layer means an additional task to perform in comprimising the system, you are not necessarily providing any more security than requiring two keys to login. Furthermore, the attacker now has shell access on the machine (as root...) and can attempt to exploit local programs rather than attacking via TCP/IP.
I obviously am not familiar with selinux's methods of authentication, but unless I'm really missing something, it doesn't matter. It's simply another layer.
How long has it been since gentoo has had a stable build? (The rough equivalent of asking why I should dink with their brownware.)
Deciding what goes into a kernel is not the same as making the choices involved in a distribution. A kernel is 30 or so meg of source code with contributions by a small number of people. A distribution like slackware is 700+ meg of source code (not including the extras disk) with contibutions from thousands of people. In a kernel you pick yes or no to a driver or api. In a distribution you have to make the same call (not many distros ship un patched kernels) as well as all of the aplications that will make it usefull. There are lots of OS developers that are a one man show. An OS is small compared to the size of a distribtuion and all the aplications and decisions that go into making the kernel/OS useful.
Ascii artist &
Where would "Open Source" be if every person who invested a large ammount of time in an open source project expected to be compensated in a business sense? Really if you want to be paid for the work you do, get a job.
Well, partly true...
See, once our friendly 3133t h4x0r has r00ted our box, and are currently finding his way to
break the SELinux layer, it is pretty easy to spot him and kick his butt out of the server,
change the root password, patch the hole that let him in, etc.
With standard linux, once he roots, you are basicaly fscked, since he will install his root-kit
immediately and hide his activity from you. Tough luck.
I wish I had this think on my router... It got r00ted by some fuck from the netherlands. I was
able to find it out in about 2 hours, since it acted a bit weird (shitty rootkit, probably), but
god knows what he did in this meantime... So I had it reinstalled (no big deal, just NAT box), this
time with better security (mandrake's "paranoid security").
See, the 2-identical-layer-security thing has saved my ass, since the dude had to stop at the router
for a while to scan my network and prepare attacks on the inner boxes. Thank god I figured it out in
time, if he fscked some ineer machine it would be hell.
It was pure luck, since obviously it was a shitty rootkit (ie, it fscked "ps" but not "pstree" or "top", for
example). But, having 2-level security in the same machine makes pretty easy to quickly detect
intruders and deal with them.
cheers.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
A fair number of people, myself included, will be quite happy with an OS that does not really worry about a market. I have no problem paying for games, or really powerful and useful software, but it is nice to have an OS that is not tied to a company.
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
--Thomas J. Kopp
Makes everything look so simple, doesn't it. Starting from now, but looking the other way, into the future, anyone who can do two things - predict which of the various possible alternative approaches to doing something in an OS distribution, or even a set of applications will in 2007 obviously have been the correct way to go; - convince the rest of us that they can see it and are right Is useful to have around, if somewhat scary.
He's talking about recoding a Python program in Perl?? And then in C?? Why stop there? Why not continue on to assembly language? And then machine language?
Sigh. And zynot was starting to look pretty good, up to that point. Anybody who 1) didn't realize that Gentoo was a for-profit (not your profit) Linux distribution, and 2) doesn't like Python, obviously lacks good judgement.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I think what they were hoping is that you would be willing to do a rather important piece of work most people won't do. Namely, debugging. Everybody seems to want to be on the cutting edge, leading into the future, but no one really seems to want to get rid of existing bugs.
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
--Thomas J. Kopp
... the difference between an Gentoo fork and a Gentoo based distribution?
If it were called a new Gentoo based distribution, this article would not sound as interesting.
I'm there.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Whats "ready for the desktop" got to do with
whether someone likes a particular GUI or not ?
I dont like windozzz, is it ready for the desktop ?.
"I hear they tried that in Russia once. I wonder how that worked out."
While you do present quite a number of examples, I think they are due a more careful analysis.
You are associating capitalism with choice and variety, while associating an economy with more government influence with no choice and no variety. This association is generally both unnecessary and unwarranted. Government influence does not equate to government restriction. The government can also serve to promote and enable choice and innovation, if you are willing to allow it to and if you are willing to put in place measures to ensure accountability and responsiveness to those persons it collectively has an obligation to better.
That Pepsi brand cola was permitted to come about when we already had Coca-Cola brand cola does not speak to any advantage of a free market system. The tastes of a significant number of people are better satisfied by Pepsi brand cola than by Coca-Cola brand cola. These differings tastes are, in moderation, tastes which legitimately should be satisfied. That Pepsi brand cola is available is probably, and for this reason, a net benefit.
However, a free market economy is completely unnecessary both for the continued satisfaction of these diverse tastes and for the innovation which lead to the creation of Pepsi brand cola to satisfy these tastes.
Since the satisfaction of these diverse tastes is a net good (as it seems to be), to the extent it is indicated to us by the most scientific of means that the greater satisfaction of our present tastes and of other more diverse tastes in cola beverages will be a net good, we should pool our resources together to fund the research of groups or individuals who we have most reason to believe will be capable of producing new more satisfying beverage varieities, and who will be appropriately open to assimilating the ideas and innovations of private members of the community in this respect.
This might result in slightly less choice for a small minority of cola aficionados, but would provide more innovative, more satisfying beverages to the majority of cola consumers. While you may not have access to OK soda on the shelves of your supermarket if the cost of providing distribution of OK soda to your supermarket outweighs the good produced by the satisfaction of diverse tastes provided by this refreshing and innovative beverage in your area, you also do not in this case have a right or legitimate expectation to have innovative and refreshing OK soda available on your supermarket shelves. In this case, you might still have access to OK soda, but only if specially ordered electronically, as you do today.
I want you to think about the $5million venture cap money burned through by Eazel. I want you to consider Nautilus. I want you to tell me why it's STILL slow as a three-legged dog and mostly unusable as a file manager. Why?
Economics teaches us that monopolists have little reason to innovate or benefit the consumer or efficiency. It also teaches us that there are returns to scale. Somewhere between all and none lie the numbers, the exact numbers and sizes of firms to maximize innovation and efficiency would require someone with the resources to do a study on the matter.
In the Free Market, companies very quickly find out they suck because no one buys their stuff, and they're out of cash. The only real kill mechanisms in open source are word of mouth and download count popularity. But you are very right about many projects that are a waste of time. If you're gonnna make crazy unique prerequisites and not really have any integration or popular appeal for your project, you're a tool.
But thats your choice - you have the right to be a tool. After all, I dont think thered be too many freewheeling hackers in an delegating authority that decided which open source footsoldiers would donate their time to such dictated project. If not the freedom to squander your time and effort, why then the freedom of software? Just let closed source be 'efficient.'
Note: I am a Gentoo developer...
A lot of things have been greatly exaggerated. Evaluate everything on the basis of how well it works and how you are treated as a user. Don't listen to the FUD. The signal:noise ratio is -dev is not particularly good. Things are fine.
For the last 6 months, Gentoo has been white-hot in terms of new users and the rate of change. The team has been juggling a lot of new ideas, issues, and influx of new developers.
I'm sure you all can do the math in knowing when the # of users goes up, so does the amount of noise in Bugzilla and the forums (and IRC). But some of the policies and procedures hadn't been adjusted to scale with the spike in new users yet.
There are growing pains. The Gentoo "organization" came from a somewhat informal, immature development process that was well-suited to getting it up off the ground. That worked well in its time. However, we have a lot more users now; things have to change.
Inevitably, you end up frustrating two types of developers: those who agreed a change should happen but wanted it painted "RED" instead of "BLUE" (if you get my meaning), and those who liked things as they were.
Others yet don't mind the changes, but feel some of their proposals should be getting through in equal time/priority. It's frustrating for some, sure. People are busy and have real lives and paying jobs, etc. Working in OSS demands that you have flexible expectations of others, patience, and humility.
Daniel and Kurt's restructure plan may or may not be the best solution. We won't know for sure until 3-6-9-12 months from now, but it's a step in the right direction.
The whole point of these changes is to help scale the organization better, and improve communication -- all of which (hopefully) will give new ideas traction, and get them completed sooner.
I remain a Gentoo developer. For me, apart from FreeBSD, there is really no decent alternative for what Gentoo does well. From a my "developer" standpoint, it's a pretty simple thing. If I continue to have fun and learn while on the team, I will stay.
I remember Alan Cox saying once that he doesn't expect Linux to go on forever, but that parts of it will go on to form new things later on. That's an awesome statement because it asserts what I believe OSS is all about. Patent-free code sharing.
I wish Zach and the others well in Zynot and I personally believe both projects can co-exist. And if either one fails in the future, hopefully the best aspects of both can be merged into a new whole again. That's the beauty of OSS.
Should be exciting (at least, as exciting as operating systems ever get)...
If you really believe that, your reading comprehension skills are even poorer than I imagined. I never even said Gentoo was superior to FreeBSD. I only ripped on you for your snobbish attitude. It's you who has been ripping on people just because they don't use *BSD.
Maybe it's not so hard to boggle. Welcome to the real world which doesn't revolve around you.
I'll be happy to tell him you think he's a moron if you want.
I've tried to have a reasonable discussion and come to some consensus, but all you can do is look down your nose and insult the intelligence of both me and my friends. If I thought all *BSD users were as unreasonable as you are, I'd never consider trying it. However, I know former and current *BSD users who aren't as egotistical as you are.