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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.
... it's still compiling.
A free distro?
;-)
What?
A free distro?
Oh right, yeah. But beside that, what has he given us?
Technical support?
Oh yeah, that goes without saying...
Infrastructure?
Yeah, oh yeah it was much worse before...
Ok ok, beside a free distro, technical support and infrastructure what has he given us? That's right, nothing...
The copyrights to the distro?
Oh shut up you!
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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/
Doubt that. There are many many many people behind the scenes of Gentoo. Specifically each package you see there has at least one maintainer [most maintainers handle a slew of stuff].
Thought yeah some central authority to guide the project is required asap to keep the momentum.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"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.
After 4 years of compilation and rapid disk usage growth, the build was 98% complete when the hard drive became full and the the build failed. Daniel Robbins was then struck by a wave of despair and tendered his resignation. Last we heard of him, he was in a house for the mentally disabled, installing, formatting then reinstalling Mandrake and Debian on a 486 box over and over again, banging his head on the wall, munbling incomprehensible things about "precompiled" this or that...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Should one wear a "tux" to a Linux distro's funeral?
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
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.
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no masked or unmasked ebuilds to satisfy "chief_architect".
!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.
linucks root #
From the article:
Copyright Assignment to Gentoo
Gentoo Technologies Inc. Copyright Assignment Form
Gentoo Documentation Issues
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
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.
In roughly the same place we were three years ago. :-)
From OS News, Posted on 2002-05-14:
Does Robbins own all of the stock in Gentoo Technologies, Inc.? If so, conversion to non-profit status may be easy (though having the IRS recognize it as non-profit for tax purposes may not.) If others own some of the stock, it conversion may prove problematic as they might have to agree. Otherwise, there might be a shareholders lawsuit for corporate waste (i.e., in this case, making a gift of corporate assets without compensation).
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.)
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
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.
The story of Daniel Robbins and Gentoo Linux seems to me to be an example of software as art and Daniel as a starving artist. And yes, I realize that many other people were involved in the Gentoo project. But one of the leading forces behind Gentoo seems to be leaving because he can't afford to take part in the project anymore.
The world does not owe artists, writers or software engineers working on open source/ Free Software a living. But what is interesting to me is that if, for the sake of argument, some commercial entity, like Red Hat, were to come along and start selling Gentoo at some point in the future, Daniel Robbins and the rest of the Gentoo developers would get as much as the Linux developers got from Red Hat going public (e.g., very little).
If software engineering jobs were not moving overseas and our income was not under constant downward pressure this might not be such a big deal. There is a lot to be said for doing something you love. For many people money can't replace this. But when it gets to the point where you can't pay your bills or are unemplyed, survival becomes the important issue.
Speaking for myself, the current state of our industry throws into question any open source project that can be picked up by slick marketeers and resold to end users. Since I'm not independently wealthy, why should I work for free? I have to wonder if Daniel Robbins is not asking himself similar questions as he looks at the state of his finances.
For more on this see my essay Freedom Can be Slavery
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
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.
Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.