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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.
I have learned more about how Linux works in the last year with Gentoo than I had in the previous 3 trying RH, Debian and Suse.
1) Leader resigns
:(
2) Developers don't agree on future features, etc.
3) Gentoo goes down the crapper.
4) Distro gets forked.
5) Both go down the drain.
Pitty
Daniel was an important, driving force behind Gentoo and his absence will undoubtedly be felt on the team. That said, he has laid the groundwork for a Not-for-Profit organization, lead by a Board of Trustees that will continue to ensure that Gentoo Linux remains a vibrant, capable distribution.
For those of you concerned about this change, I remind you that Gentoo is one of the few remaining community-based Linux distributions. We are as successful as our community makes us. Thus, the best thing you can do to ensure the future success of Gentoo is to participate in its development, whether it be through testing ebuilds, writing documentation, fixing bugs on bugzilla or any one of the thousands of myriad tasks that make up Gentoo Linux.
I'm not sure what Daniel's plans are for the future, but I wish him the best in whatever he chooses to pursue.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
OSS is dominated by developers, which is a strength when it comes to the quality of the software. But that's not all they need, and we know that developers want to spend their time writing code, not managing growing projects.
Perhaps we should find some zelous people to grow pointy hair and act stupid to be the OSPHBs.
Its well enough. It goes to show that talent is something you cannot fake, not even with a committee. When I saw Gentoo three things really stood out for me,
1) It was a truely refreshing outlook on a distribution
2) It is source based
3) I was free from being unwitting pawn in the software binary release freedom debate
When I ran and got to know Gentoo I saw genius was at work, the light nimble free-floating kind of genius unencumbered by committee. Much of that was DRobbins shining through (as shown by his technical writings of frontier Linux applications for IBM.)
I will be sad to see him go, but to me it looked as if his inspiration was diluted by so many faces long ago. Don't get me wrong Gentoo is still my favorite and I run it exclusively at home. I think its gained much from Seemant and the others. But you just have to admire sometimes what individual talent can do on its own.
the copyrights have been entrusted to a nonprofit foundation
Non-profits can be abused. Many non-profit charities pay their CEO's millions in salary and bonuses. I seem to remember the CEO of United Way getting paid something $25 million a while back. Non-profits can pretty much do anything they want with their money. Large paychecks, bonuses, wasteful spending, whatever... Anyway, just being non-profit does not make it a bastion of integrity.
I think Daniel made a very wise decision. Gentoo is his child, and it looks like the child is reaching maturity and it's time for Gentoo to move out of the parents' house.
We'd all like to be doing what we love to do, but sometimes we learn to grow by doing what makes us more money and ultimately more leisure time to spend with friends and family.
Participation in the dog-eat-dog struggle is almost entirely unnecessary for most people. The poverty level in Western countries exceeds the upper middle class of most other countries.
One could, if one were willing to give up one's lifestyle, live cheaply and have leisure time for friends and family in abundance. A trailer home in Kentucky can be had for $1000, and a diet of ground beef, flour, spices and vegetables can sustain a family for less than $5000 a year.
You are not working for leisure time, don't kid yourself. Almost any working American today could retire and move to a 3rd world country and live comfortably forever. You are working for DSL, the new Radeon, that huge TV, the laptop, your spiffy car, fancy dinners, nice clothes and every other element required to 'keep up with the Joneses'. You find those things more valuable than pursuit of what you love, if you are not doing what you love.
Oh, please! If all the linux distros had a contest for best installer, Gentoo and Debian would be battling it out for last place.
Oh, and don't bother with the newbie flames: My first linux install was a prehistoric version of Slackware with a 1.0.9 kernel downloaded onto 22 floppy disks over a 14.4 modem, and it had a better installer than either one of them.
I empathize. I started a Linux based company in late 1999. We got VC, hired people, tried to get the business going, expand it, realized that Linux was not going to peak any time soon in our geographical area, had to lay off people, went almost entirely broke... well, you know the deal. It's been over 4 years now, but we're still hanging in there, and now the Linux landscape is starting to look better, things are picking up, and who knows?
I understand the dilemma of a new family and a lot of debt. Been there, done that. But I think we're just on the cusp of something grand. I hope Daniel doesn't get so far out that he can't come back and reap some of the rewards when this thing pays off. I know it will! Gentoo and Linux are just too great to write off. And I hope that once a lot of the bottom feeders (myself included) making a living off X free distro, start taking responsibility, and budget R&D funds, maybe then we'll see some joy. We at least are looking ahead to make it part of our budget, a percentage of each sale.
Good luck, Daniel, hang in there.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
You can take your personal criticisms of Dan and politely ram them up your ass.
Let me make something clear here. I don't know Dan. Never met him, never talked with him. What I do know, however, is that he fits a mold i've seen over and over again in the past 10 years. There's a certain spirit of selflessness and altruism that underpins pretty much everything "major" going on in the Linux community. People like Dan give hours upon hours of their time, building, creating, fixing, and helping people they can't even see, and know they will never meet. They do it because it's fun, and they do it because it makes them feel good to know they're helping someone else. That's all there is to it.
Just incase you weren't in school the day they taught this, here's basically how it works: Criticizing the character or works of someone who shows charity, thoughtfulness, and selflessness makes you a royal fucking asshole. Infact, ANY form of criticism of people like Dan aught to be promptly rejected, returned, then rammed tightly up the ass of it's issuer.
You, the beneficiary of the hard work of people like Daniel Robbins and the Gentoo development community, have absolutely no right to complain, question, or laugh at any decision he happens to make in regard to his own life. Looking back at the Linux community landscape over the past 5 years, we can see what happened to people who continually gave blindly, and asked for essentially nothing in return. Dan's decision to pull back from the front lines is one of the smartest moves he could possibly make at this point of the game. Criticisms about software are one thing. Commentary on someone's financial status are something entirely different, and something you have no fucking right to criticize..Especially from someone who did nothing but give you shit for free.
And even if that weren't the case here....that he's turning the reins over for a totally different reason...WTF have you done that gives you the right to criticize him, or anyone who in his position?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
right. i'm not sure which 3rd world country you're dreaming about, but the $20,000 debt daniel robbins has isn't going to let him live comfortably anywhere forever. how do you live off of negative money?
not to mention he has a wife and kids. i don't think you can support a wife and kids for less than $5000 a year.
I see the desire to give users choice leading to fragmentation. This is quite different from seeing one or the other.
The Macintosh platform is my preferred choice. However, this has nothing to do with configurability, and everything to do with ease-of-use. In fact, I take exception to Apple forcing me to use the Aqua interface. Sure, it's pretty to look at, but there are certain aspects about it that drive me nuts. The Dock sucks. Menulettes suck. Why they couldn't just stick the OS 7/8/9 Platinum interface on Unix, like they did with AUX, I'll never know. And there are asects that are inconsistent within the interface itself. It definately needs more work. But if I go sit down at any other Mac with OS X, I'll know how to find my way around and get work done. The same can't necessarily be said of the different Linux desktop environments.
I agree. But will someone who just got up from the Xandros desktop be able to sit down at a Linspire desktop and be just as productive? This is what I think should be the goal; unity for the masses, with choice available for those who desire it.
Thanks for the response. It's nice to get a reasoned response to such a hot-button topic.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
He can put down on his resume that he created one of the top 10 most popular Linux distros, and that he supervised quite a few interesting technical innovations unique to that distro.
This experience would help qualify for a job with a salary quite a bit more than $20,000 (not to mention more influence and responsibility) over that of a random code monkey.
The best damned linux forums out there for non-techies, half-techies, and anyone who uses Gentoo, or Linux, for that matter. Let's hope that the new arrangement can keep those forums operating.
That said, isn't what they are keeping is essentially the trademark to the name? Gentoo can still be forked, if necessary, right? ( I don't think it will be necessary, but given the recent XFree mess, one never knows) - however, the great loss would be the forums.
Yes, I run Gentoo - all my boxes do, and will, for the foreseeable future. The reason for that is that in addition to giving me the most control over how I build them, Gentoo is by far the easiest Build From Scratch setup I've encountered yet. I like to know what's in my systems, like to sourcebuild them, yet I don't want to have to keep hundreds of pages of notes on how to do so. Gentoo fills that need more than anything else has so far.
FYI, I'm not a n00b, nor a guru, I fall in between.
Good luck, Daniel, in whatever you do!
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Those who are running the project are often "disconnected" because they get loaded down with so many responsibilities that are not directly connected with the users/developers that they cannot respond directly anymore.
....it had to be said.
IMO, Theo's biggest failure is in NOT disconnecting himself with the day to day details. I don't know if it explains his attitude, but it certainly may contribute to it.
IFO suspect that Daniel is leaving the project because it's become such a burden to him that he no longer can spend any time doing anything else. Now, if he'd quit during the early days, a couple years ago, yeah, I'd have a beef with that. But he stuck it out, and now he's turning it over to other people whom he trusts so he can go on to things that are just as important (or maybe more so) to him.
Perhaps he's a PITA to deal with, for you, because you don't realize that he's overloaded. I'm not in his position, but I am in one that is similar (if perpendicular) and I can understand quite well why he's done this.
No offense, but there's a limit to how much one can take before you want to say "fuck this, there's other things I want to do". I reached my limit in that respect several times in the last 18 years in various jobs. Can you say the same?
I'm older than Daniel, I don't have a family, but I've been in that situation enough that I understand why he's doing this. The lesson that Theo hasn't learned is that when you start burning out you should walk away and hand the reins to people you trust, rather than sticking it out and pissing people off.
Sorry for the rant, and maybe I'm wrong but
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
but I don't see what role zynot can fill in the linux landscape.
If it does nothing else, it consumes resources that would have otherwise been used by Gentoo. Forks can be a good thing, but they can also be a bad thing. The OpenBSD fork ended up being a good thing--OpenBSD fills an entirely different role from NetBSD. The GCC/EGCS fork also ended up being good--the new totally replaced the old.
In a way, I agree with you--the Zynot fork probably is hurting more than helping. There was a window of time to get moving, and that window has passed. Now all the fork is doing is diverting resources. On the other had, that a fork was created can have a positive impact just by existing. It highlights problems with the original project, and creates a drive to fix those problems. And if the problems aren't fixed, the secondary project is waiting in the wings to take over.
My point in noting the fork was this: you don't create a fork unless there is a problem. Generally a big problem, where a lot of effort has been put in to try and resolve, but nothing has come of it. Regardless of whether Zynot amounts to anything, there was a fork, and that is signifigent in and of itself.