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.

Comments

Could be a great thing

[KentoNET]

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.

Gentoo for embedded systems

[NTmatter]

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?

As a Gentoo user...

[dafoomie]

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.

Re:As a Gentoo user...

[Deusy]

Personally, I'm going to wait before there's something fundamentally wrong with Gentoo before I switch.

I lean towards agreement with this statement. It's not as if Gentoo does not have a Social Contract and is closed in any way. Sure, a few private mail lists may exist, as they do in other projects, and there may be business motives behind key Gentoo developers. But at the end of the day the project is GPL, top to bottom, (hence it is forkable) and it will not go in a direction that disatisfies the non-core developers and user community, otherwise it will lose those two precious commodities and cease to exist.

And at the end of the day, people have to put bread on the table. If they find a way to do that through a GPL project, good luck to them. I say good luck to both Gentoo and Zynot, and given my excellent experiences in using Gentoo (never will I go back to something rpm based) I'll be using the best one of the two for the forseeable future.

Who knows, maybe the fork will be good and any co-operation - intentional or through GPL'd code swapping - will probably benefit both distros. (Yes, projects can co-operate in when the leads hate each other, that's the GPL for you.)

It's only tyranny when someone else is in charge

[mikeophile]

Ok, in Mr Welsh's article, he give this as the primary reason for the fork:

Ultimately, my personal problems with Daniel and Gentoo in general can not be solved by this restructuring; the organization will still place a single person with final authority about the distribution. I would not trust any single person to lead a distribution of this size

Then, on the very next page, he says this:

Who will be in charge?

At first, I will be the ultimate arbiter and policy maker with regard to the direction, culture, and policies. I am the one that has decide to gamble career and reputation by forking this project; I am the one organizing, leading, and capitalizing it. This paper presents the vision that I have crafted for it, and while one that has been subject to significant scrutiny and feedback, it still largely reflects the vision of one single person.

Whaaaa?

Re:SERIOUS QUESTION

[dsavitsk]

It seems that the jist of your comment is a distrust of competition to weed out weakness and support strength. For better of for worse, it seems that most systems more of less work this way. MS is where they are because they beat out lots of dead ends. Same goes for GE, GM, Sony, etc. It's even true for governments, and for species (neanderthal?).

There is some truth that competition is not always the best way to get things done. Further, winning should not be confused with being the best. Many mistakes are made, but before anyone is going to believe that competition and free markets are not the practical best way to progress, you will need to show how someone at the top could know in advance the best option. Gecko may be dead as to KHTML as you say, but one could not have guessed this when Mozilla started.

Re:Wow

[Zork the Almighty]

Gentoo Linux is for-profit. He expected they would spin off a company to do embedded systems, and that he would be "in on it". Turns out that wasn't the case, so he forked the project (it's all GPL, after all) and he's going to do his own thing. Kudos to him, so long as this doesn't turn into a FUD war.

Reasons for forking are personal.

[bsdfish]

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) . . .

Re:So much for the greatness of Gentoo

[KentoNET]

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.

Re:SERIOUS QUESTION

[Calgary]

It's simple to say that if all the man power poured into all projects solving a certian problem were instead put into just one really good project, then the best possible solution would result. There Mack Truck sized flaw here is that you are assuming that humans are not involved.

As the article notes, it's primarialy a personallity problem which lead to this fork. Misunderstanding happen, people's feelings get hurt, and some people just want different things. These all lead to conflicts which can ultimatly harm a project. Face the facts about human nature: some people just can't work together.

Aside from personality conflicts, there's also the people of organizing a lot of people. Organization necessarially leads to buracracy. Lot's of people hate buracracy, and lots of people like to root for the underdog. In a large organization, which would be necessary to combine all the little projects, people coming on to the project would find the structure so unwieldly and confusing that they would just prefer to start over with a new organization.

Competition among open source projects lets users choose (where user may denote an end user like your Mom, or a corporate user like Apple) which is right for them. In this way, OpenSource is like capitalism. People get to choose the product which best fullfils their needs. The only difference (generally speaking) is that direct monetary cost for the product is removed from the equation (support, hardware, etc would still have to be considered).

One other point is that a lot of new coders who don't have enough skill to contribute directly to an established project will often release things they did to teach themselves as OpenSource. This doesn't really dilute the marketplace, since often such projects get abandonded quickly as their creators move on to bigger and better things, or are obviously lacking. So while it may sound reasonable to have one really good IRC client instead of a million half finished ones (and a few finished ones), the argument assumes that everyone is capable of contributing the high quality code as soon as the start to learn to program.

...mch...