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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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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) . . .
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...
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/ 9606
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
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!
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.
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
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!
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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