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Gentoo Linux Musings
ChaserPnk writes "Gentoo has been in the news recently. First with the news that Daniel Robbins leaving Gentoo and then with Gentoo Linux 2004.1 being recently released. Have you ever wondered how Gentoo got started? An article at IBM DeveloperWorks explains how. Get to know the history of Gentoo."
darthcamaro wrote in with a related story that suggests that Gentoo is preparing to change directions soon: "Is Gentoo gearing up to be the third major enterprise distro? That's what an article running on internetnews.com points to. They talked to the head of Gentoo's enterprise efforts. For those that think that Gentoo Enterprise is far off, Gentoo's guy figures if they had the cash they'd be up and running in 6 months."
I was a little surprised by the internetnews.com article about Gentoo being used in the enterprise. Kurt Lieber (of Gentoo) even claims that "Gentoo is being widely used in corporations today", although his definition of "widely used" may be different than mine.
As great as Gentoo is, it's not high on the list of distros that I would have guessed the business world would embrace. Granted, Gentoo's flexibility does seem to make it well-suited for certain enterprise-level applications; and if Debian can be adapted for commercial consumption in the form of distributions like Xandros, then I suppose Gentoo could as well.
Lieber's target market is a niche market. While I certainly agree that Linux' future shouldn't be arbitrated by one or two vendors, I'm not convinced that the enterprise niche Lieber describes is best served by a commercial version of Gentoo. Regardless, it's unclear from the article whether or not he would actually commercialize Gentoo given the chance.
But the popularization of Gentoo's approach could have other connotations. It's easy to relegate Portage to the realm of Linux curiosities that never could have mainstream appeal. On the surface, it seems that way. But this is exactly the sort of system I would expect to see standardized once our network infrastructure and home computer technology matures to the point at which package acquisition and build time are negligible.
But for the time being, we're still a point at which we're trying to establish some solid standards in the Linux world, and as much as I want RPM to go away, it won't any time soon. So while I don't foresee Portage triggering any revolutions within the next few years, the concept will evolve and its day will come.