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

Re:Hardneded Gentoo

[KentoNET]

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.

SERIOUS QUESTION

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:SERIOUS QUESTION

[Strudelkugel]

A good question, or several, actually. The problem with OpenSource, from a business point of view, is that it is almost impossible to make a big bet with it and gain from the insight that inspired the bet in the first place. Jobs and Wozniak bet on a friendly looking computer and a whimsical company image. Once established, no one could catch up to it for a long time. Gates bet on stripping out the windowing functions of OS/2, leaving the superiority of OS/2 behind in favor of lower cost. Similar big bets were made by Dell, Ellison and others. Now imagine an environment were their ideas were instantly distributed to everyone else, especially before they were completely evolved. I bet none of them would have market gained traction.

As I have mentioned in other posts, there only three promising Linux markets: high end, which Red Hat will likely win, ultra low end, where Lindows is well positioned, and embedded (TiVo). Successful technology strategies have few peers...

-1, Flamebait

[mrscorpio]

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

Re:Wow

[OverlordQ]

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?

When your 'contributions' include managing the entire ARM and Embedded projects, loaning 5 machines to the infrastructure, then practically thrown out of the loop once the founder figures out there could be good money involved.

Re:Hear, hear!

[gladbach]

I'm pretty dubious both ways... for one thing, we've only heard his side of it, but on another thing, it sounds pretty shady for him to have contributed all that, then having DR cut him out of the loop, seemingly wanting to keep the future money prospects to himself.

(why they couldnt have worked together, I have no idea. Could have been a nice contractual partnership)

I love gentoo. I haven't installed another linux distro since the early betas. But when it comes to linux and politics, nothign would suprise me anymore. Certainly not when it comes to finding a buisness model to supporta GPL project.

An answer to the serious question

[fireboy1919]

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.

Yep, just what we need.

[wiresquire]

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'.

Not the first time someone have thought of forking

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay! at last!

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 :)) 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.

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 :)), and someone with a dedicated server for hosting was found...

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.

Community is Community -- Business is Business

[mmurphy000]

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 leadership of open source projects with significant commercial potential need to recognize this and have a model for how they are going to deal with it, such that their goals are met and as many goals of the community as possible are also met, as the community is what gives the project "legs"
• Non-founders of open source projects need to recognize that social relationships are not a replacement for business relationships, so if you intend to commercialize open source, either establish the business relationships you need or be prepared to rely solely on the license if the social relationships prove insufficient