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Daniel Robbins Resigns As Chief Gentoo Architect
bdowne01 writes "Gentoo Linux has experienced rapid growth in the past year--much to the credit of Daniel Robbins, the founder and Chief Architect of the project. Earlier today, he announced his resignation from his role on the gentoo-nfp mailing list."
Tester adds "But before leaving, he has set up a non-profit foundation that will own all of the copyrights to Gentoo. The initial board of trustees will be appointed by Daniel, but next year they will be elected. The membership of the foundation will be open." Reader burnitall points out a note on the Gentoo homepage reading "... We are extremely sad to see Daniel Robbins depart, and we both wish him the best in his new endeavors and promise that the door will always be open for his return." Robbins' message also indicates he hopes
to continue working on the release engineering aspect of Gentoo.
To see Daniel go, but at the very least, the copyrights have been entrusted to a nonprofit foundation, which gives me at least some peace of mind.
From the article:
Copyright Assignment to Gentoo
Gentoo Technologies Inc. Copyright Assignment Form
Gentoo Documentation Issues
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Arrgh. Time to feed the trolls. Let me explain. After the install, you never actually wait for the packages to compile/install. You can use kde-3.2.0 while (should you feel the need to upgrade) you are compiling 3.2.2.
I've got you down as a friend, so you must have said something insightful in the past.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Here's a snippit:
This is from the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter:
"While Daniel Robbins is busy converting Gentoo into a not-for-profit
organisation on his side of the Atlantic, the German Gentoo developers
have finalised all the necessary steps for registering an almost identical
legal entity, called "eingetragener Verein" (registered association) under
the German law. It'll take the commercial courts another four to six weeks
to acknowledge the setup, but the association[11] is already operational,
has opened a bank account, and started raking in bushels of money via
their new online shop[12], whose main advantage over the Gentoo store[13]
in the US lies in its comparatively low-cost deliveries to customers in
Germany."
"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." -Robert Frost
No details yet - but this
looks like it may well be part of the reason;
specifically, he cannnot (and should not) have to shoulder the financial risk necessary to shift gentoo to its full Not For Profit status.
Given that he has a young family to support, I for one can sympathise with his position.
There's going to be an official announcement once the dust settles slightly, but thisappears to be the live gentoo forum thread.
Go easy on it, the forums are pretty heavily loaded at the best of times, and the last thing the place needs is a full blown slashdotting!
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
www.gentoo.org
:-( need I say more?
jump into the forums and see the community, they welcome all with open arms.
Read the *complete* documentation, and if you still don't get it, ask the question in a forum. No one will answer with an elitist attitude, just a gentle nudge in the right direction.
High Speed, Cross Country, Linux - just what my processor with all those silly extensions I paid for (SSE, SSE2, 3DNow!) needs.
Compile times? Check out distcc - www.distcc.org
Want binaries? no problem - Binary installs also supported.
Stable - oops, Fedora crashed again during an update, switched to Gentoo and never looked back. If your Gentoo crashed, that is because you used the wrong mask - RTFM - I know, cause I did it.
Hardware Support - ANY BSD I tried
Hopefully the community can handle the shock, but Dave Robbins has a family that needs him as well.
To Dave, best of luck. We will take the torch and do our best to keep it burning, trolls be damned!
Birukun
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
It's "Gen" as in "generator" like you said. It's actually named after the Gentoo penguin, which is reputed to be the fastest swimming species of penguin in the world. And as Gentoo has a reputation of being fast, it's only fitting.
Straight from the FAQ: 'the "g" in "gentoo" is a soft "g", as in "gentle"'. You know, as in the name of the penguin species, or as in Gen(eration) Two?
Why was Gentoo Technologies, Inc. initially set up as a for-profit company? It doesn't make sense. Since it was not a 501(c)(3) non-profit, donations to Gentoo Technologies, Inc. were not tax deductible. (Hell, it may have been the case that the donors were legally, albeit technically, responsible to pay gift tax on any donation over the annual limit.)
I don't know the particulars with Gentoo, but I was party to the creation of a not-for-profit last year and started a corporation some years ago. That experience leads me to believe expediancy may have been the reason. Establishing a corporation is just a matter of filling out some forms and sending them off to the state capital. Establishing a not-for-profit is a labor intensive and expensive process involving lots of lawyers and consultation with the IRS. For the not-for-profit we got pro-bono legal help, but even so it hardly seems worth it in retrospect.
Just some quick answers to your questions (link references posted below):
1) Does Daniel Robbins own all of the stock in Gentoo Technologies?
A: I believe so. However, that company will no longer hold the intellectual property/copyrights for Gentoo (as it currently does). Those are being transferred to the new, NFP entity, The Gentoo Foundation: From the Gentoo site:
"In the proposal, Gentoo Foundation, Inc. will hold the intellectual property of the project..."
From Daniel:
"Gentoo Technologies, Inc. will transfer the copyrights and trademarks to the Gentoo Foundation. In exchange, the Gentoo Foundation will grant Daniel Robbins & Gentoo Technologies, Inc. perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free use of the "Gentoo" trademark and "G" logo. This will allow me to continue to run the Gentoo Store if I want."
2) Why was Gentoo Technologies, Inc. initially set up as a for-profit?
--------------A: The project was supported by donations, but was also supported by commercial offerings through the Gentoo Store and other ventures. From past postings I've read it was easier to structure the company that way (at least initially), even though there were drawbacks to the tax exemption possibilities, as you point out. It was just simpler given the many things they were doing (Gentoo Store, Gentoo Games, etc.).
For more information you can check the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter edition for April 19, 2004.
Please also see Daniel's transition plan.
Greg T.
If you install a binary Apache, does it come with mod_foo? What if you wanted mod_foo? What if you didn't? The binary is going to be built one way or the other, and if your preferences aren't the same as the distribution maintainer's, then you're not a happy camper.
It's not just about CCFLAGS; there's the USE flags too.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
as stated in the gentoo forums, the money doesnt go directly to him...
Actually, if you want to help Daniel, buy a T-Shirt, CD or something. It appears that the donations just go to the NFP. Not that that's bad mind you, just ineffective for Daniel.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
Stuff that is released under the GPL is still copyrighted. If it weren't, authors wouldn't be able to license it under the GPL or any other license. The whole point of the GPL is to say "you can license this copyrighted code, but under these conditions..." (where "these conditions" include an agreement to license any distributed contributions to the code under the GPL too)
That said, other non-GPL'd stuff regarding Gentoo might also be copyrighted. Like original documentation or scripts, configuration program, help files, etc..
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
While he certainly was the driving force behind Gentoo, it wasn't all good.
To put it bluntly, Mr. Robbins is an utter PITA to work with. Many of the same things that have been said about Theo de Raadt (true or not) could be said about drobbins. This has alread caused a fork in Gentoo. My very limited exposure to dealing with Mr. Robbins left me with such a bad taste in my mouth I just decided to drop it rather than put up with it.
Gentoo is a wonderful distribution, which I still use. But like several other open source projects (*cough*xfree86*cough*thebsds*cough*), those running the project were operating disconnected from their user/developer base. It isn't that central control is bad (Linus keeps control of final say) but that a central control that doesn't play nice with others is going to spell trouble.
I hope that Gentoo will end up better for it.
Most of the benefits of compiling from scrath lie not in speed gains, but in the ability to customize the features available. Some packages allow you to choose gtk or qt, such as lyx or vlc.
Douglas P. Price