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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.
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!
I found this on his homepage on why he was disappointed with gentoo.
" Free code, yes; free labor, no."
I still don't understand why people who give stuff away for free expect to get money for it.
If you give it away you give it away, there is no reason why anyone should pay you.
Well, you are a few weeks behind myself. I'm trying to build a multi-media machine, with full TV-capture support. I naturally started off with RedHat, only to find that you can't find everything I need in binary form, and even if you could, RedHat is suffeciently strange that loading the drivers for my video capture card just didn't work out at all.
Since loading all the devel RPMs for RedHat and working out the other odd problems would have been a month-long task (before I could even begin to start compiling the software I actually needed) I went to my favorite distro, which has no distinction between exectuable and devel packages (every package has the devel portions of the code) which happens to be Slackware (and I'd like to mention that ALL of the BSDs lump runtime/devel packages into one just as Slackware does, so you never need to worry about having the devel package installed).
So, after installing Slackware, I start working on the software, but when you have to compile dozens and dozens of dependencies, you have good odds that at least one will fail, which it did. I figure there has to be a better way, so I remember hearing that gentoo has bsd-style package management. I decide again to switch.
After burning a gentoo CD, I boot up only to find that the system crashes after a couple minutes, meaning I can't even begin the install. Searching through mailing lists, I eventually find someone else that had a different problem, but with a few similarities, who says he had better luck with rc1 (instead of the latest rc4, which the docs all tell you to use).
After getting rc1, I start going through the install steps, but go through it several times before I understand the process well enough to figure out what's been going wrong with the build, and fix it. All this, and yet no running system.
After that things mostly go smoothly, but I was quite surprised that the final step is to give the user a completely unconfigured Linux kernel, and let them configure the kernel entirely on their own. Yes, I've configured a kernel many a time before, but with no reasonable configuration to start out with, the process it quite teedious, and I had to do it about 3 times before I saw every option I needed to find, and selected it properly... After that, I thought I was home-free.
After beginning post-setup procedures, I though I'd try an ebuild, only to discover that I had no network access at all. I knew I had the kernel configured correctly, but still it wasn't able to connect to the ether. I tried the configure again, loading the NIC driver as a module instead, disabling/enabling other NIC drivers in-case of confilct or perhaps a name issue.
After about 5 more kernel recompiles, I gave up on ethernet, and gentoo all together. If I am installing a distro, I expect it to work reasonable well. Gentoo just seems to have absolutely NO system to test the functioning and interacting of the software in the distro before releasing it. Lack of eratta didn't make things any easier.
After that, I went back to the BSD zone, and installed from the FreeBSD 4.7 disc I had sitting around. Install took about 30 minutes, and I had a fully working system. About 10 minutes later, I had X configured, FXTV installed from ports, and the brooktree driver loaded, and a syscall setting adjusted to tell it my make of bktr card... So, after about a week of messing around with Linux distros, I could get any working properly, but got FreeBSD working perfectly and completely in less than an hour...
I'm not a FreeBSD fanboy, but I thought I'd pass along that very recent story. In fact, I know I need to go back to Linux, because the only BSD software for TV-viewing (FXTV/XawTV) doesn't do a very good job of recording, which is my main purpose for this system. So, although gettin
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