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Gentoo Founder Quits Microsoft
ChocLinux writes "ZDNet is reporting that Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux, has left his job at Microsoft after only eight months. From the article: 'The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences working in Microsoft's Linux Lab,' says Robbins. 'I wasn't able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating'"
What a great job the poster did at editing out any pro-Microsoft sentiments in the article summary.
We wouldn't want to have that filth on the front page of Slashdot, now would we? Here is the full quote that was only partially included in the article summary:
"The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences working in Microsoft's Linux Lab. Although I believe that the concept behind Microsoft's Linux Lab is a good one, I wasn't able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating," he said.
Also, earlier in the article:
"I didn't make the decision to leave Microsoft due to concerns about the company as a whole -- Microsoft has just had a string of very successful product launches and I anticipate that it will continue to enjoy great success," he said.
/*Actually, I have never heard of D being used in any kind of project.*/
e .html). Its not huge, or terribly useful, but it and all of the other little games written by that author are developed in D, using the BulletML library.
Well there is Torus Trooper (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_
These games are quite fun, too, in an old-fashioned arcade sort of way.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Sigs are enabled in my preferences, but the person above wasn't referring to a sig, he was referring to a URL link.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
no, a chair.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
It wasn't that shocking if you heard his reasoning. He would have continued working on Gentoo, but at that point he was $40k in debt due to his work on Gentoo. He needed to make ends meet, and working at Microsoft was one way to solve that.
Microsoft's propagan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
FYI ^W is delete word.
Why UNIX?
Yes, I agree with you 100% - Robbins is a fantastic project manager, gentoo to this day has bar none the best documentation of any opensource project I've seen and to get a Linux distribution off the ground like that with over 100 competing, Robbins is a great man.
I was responding to the comments of "he must be such a sharp coder", his code is quite possibly the worst python code I've ever seen, hacking portage was just painful.
http://gentooexperimental.org/nt/
Except there's a simple fact that most people miss. Daniel had quit contributing long before he worked at Microsoft. In fact, once the Gentoo Metastructure project was formed to give Gentoo a management structure, Daniel slowly backed away out of the picture. Once the Gentoo Foundation was formed, he left completely. It was probably a good year or two before he ever went to work at Microsoft where he wasn't "contributing" much, so if this was Microsoft's intention, they wasted their money.
This is pretty close to the truth. Amongst the Gentoo developers, the general consensus was "Well, he has to eat, doesn't he?"
Daniel didn't leave Gentoo for Microsoft. Daniel had already left Gentoo. It just happens that he kept himself low on the radar until his job at Microsoft, which spawned this giant set of conspiracy theories from the uneducated on the matter. As far as Gentoo was concerned, it was a non-issue. Daniel is a good guy and we all wished him luck. There were no harsh feelings and nobody that had a clue what was going on thought that the sky was falling. It was pretty much the same sensationalist jackasses that make a big deal out of everything that made a big deal about Daniel's "defection" to Microsoft.
A lot of this is really true, but it isn't just because of Daniel. Lots of the portage code was thrown together very hastily. Most of the features were tacked on, without any concept of how much of a mess it was making the code. The current portge team has been working to rectify this situation, but it is very hard to do when you have something like portage and must keep backwards compatibility while still keeping yourself sane. There was the portage-ng project which was supposed to be this miraculous re-write that simply never happened because ti was damn near impossible. The guys are trying to clean things up and make it more usable, as well as more modular and better designed (yeah, they actually have a design for it). I expect it to take a long time to get portage cleaned up, but at least it is being worked on by some good people.