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'"

Comments

That's always been my experience

[idkk]

But I suppose, the more experience you get, the more frustrating it becomes!

For most...

[brunes69]

.. in the software development field, this is normal.

People in software development are constantly learning more and more about their craft, constantly having access to cutting-edge technologies and APIs. But rarely do you have a job where you can play with this stuff on a day-to-day basis, because actual real-life mean and potatoes development takes place using tools and technology 3-5 years behind the curve.

When was the last time you heard of a production application being written in Ruby on Rails, or in D? Sure, there are exceptions to every rule, but for the majority of us, we are stuck using older stuff.

Which is as it should be. Because if left to our own devices, programmers would always use the most whiz-bang, untested, unstable stuff out there. It's the technophile nature.

Re:Hmm

[cbiltcliffe]

Well, come on, though. He had to know what was coming when he took the position.

You don't seriously think Microsoft would let a guy as familiar with Linux as this work in the Linux lab and tweak Linux for maximum performance for their tests, do you? They probably said there were certain things he wasn't allowed to touch, even if it would help. If he were given free reign, then all Microsoft's propagan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudies would have to be futzed some other way.

probably unable to buy into the b.s.

[slackaddict]

I was honestly shocked when I first heard about Mr. Robbins leaving one of the more geek-oriented Linux distros to work at MS. I'm sure there's much more to the story that isn't being said publicly, but he probably found the hive-like corporate culture incompatible to the freedom he had when managing his hard core distro. Going from being a superstar in the Linux/OSS world to one of the Joe's at MS had to be a huge shock.

I wish him all the best and I hope he returns to actively manage and develop Gentoo again. You can't blame him for wanting to feed his family and I'm sure he'll be welcomed back to our side.

Re:Obligatory

[Ucklak]

8 months on the salary they were paying him has given him a large enough nest egg to pursue better interests.

Some history on him

[porkThreeWays]

I think it's important to understand the history of this whole situtation to understand its current state. A few years ago, he came up with the idea for Gentoo. It was innovative at the time because there were few source based distributions out there. The idea of the source based distribution wasn't new, but portage definatly was/is the best source based package manager I've seen out there. He sunk a lot of his own personal money into gentoo that he never got back. When he left to work at MS, it pissed off a lot of purists and a lot of people shunned him. I think his move not to come back to the open source community (right now, anyway) has a lot to do with the fact he poured so much of himself into open source, and once he left to try and not live paycheck to paycheck, people immediatly forgot all of his contributions to gentoo.

Re:Zombified?

[jbolden]

I think if you look at the technologies the mainframe communities invented in the 70's and 80's many of them are just making to Unix/Linux and/or NT in this decade. They had the tecnological vision. They implemented succesfully.

Where they screwed up was culturally. Mainframe customers were conservative and so IS stagnated. The business community became frustrated and started using much worse computers where they had genuine control (PCs). Pretty soon a great deal of crucial business data was not inside the IS/IT depeartments.

With locked down PCs running only corporate approved apps and very strict change management for the desktops you are starting to see a push in the same direction. Give it another 10 years and we'll be right back in 1992 again.

Re:Hmm

[Alef]

You don't seriously think Microsoft would let a guy as familiar with Linux as this work in the Linux lab and tweak Linux for maximum performance for their tests, do you?

I imagine it would even be profitable for Microsoft to pay skilled people like him only to keep them from contributing to the Linux community...

NewBorg

[ElboRuum]

This is just the sort of reason why, when one of these little Linux/MS "updates" shows up, I just shake my head in despondency, largely because of what you mentioned, that the purists in the Linux community looked at him like a sellout. These are the same sort of "enlightened anti-groupthink" individuals who've been tearing at the buttocks of MS for years, all to the delight of Slashdotters everywhere. And people call MS users "drones"... Whatever.

The longer I read Slashdot, the more I believe there should also a picture of Linus Torvalds in a Borg headgear with maybe a green laser instead of red, right aside of good ol' Billy G. Talk about an exercise in groupthink, 90+% of Slashdotters seem to have drank the Kool-Aid where Linux is concerned.

Now you'll excuse me while I brace for the inevitable modding down into the 10th Circle of Heck to which this post will be subjected.

Re:NewBorg

[SalsaDoom]

And you deserve to be modded down too, but I won't do it. I'm a gentoo user, have been for many years now. When I heard drobbins was leaving for MSFT I was pretty choked about that in a way, but when I heard that it was because he had financial troubles and just needed a job that paid well... well, I understood. I wasn't entirely happy with it, but I understand that a man needs to pay the bills.

Now -- according to you, the everyone was seething about drobbins leaving for MSFT. It wasn't like that, we were all disappointed that drobbins had to end up at a place where we figured he wouldn't be happy and that was it. I spent a lot of time on the forums and on the irc channels back then and I never heard anyone call him a traitor or other shit like that. It made us sad, not angry -- those of us who are adults understand that you need a job that pays and sometimes that means not working on OSS all day long. drobbins MADE SURE that Gentoo would be free before he left and that proved to use that he was a good sort.

I didn't hear from these "purists" in the linux community, I don't think you did either. Some jackass somewhere might have said something but they were just some jackass somewhere and not a representative of anyones beliefs but their own.

Botton line: The Gentoo Linux community understood that their former leader had financial problems and needed a regular paying job. We wished him the best and still do.

--SD

Re:Robbins *cannot* code

[0-9a-f]

Success is not about your ability to code. Gentoo was successful not because it was great code, but because it was an idea whose time had come.

When you stop just writing code, and actually come up with a great idea, even the best coder in the world will need to write the code out as fast as he or she can, for the simple pleasure of seeing their idea actually take form.

There is a myth doing the rounds which suggests there is always time for a rewrite, but practice suggests that the people who have one good idea usually have better things to do - and are often on to their next good idea. Plus, no-one ever thanks you for a re-write.

Quick to judge

[kylef]

Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft does hire lots of *nix people. But you aren't going to be doing cutting edge work.

I suppose working with Anders Hejlsberg on the C# compiler is boring, eh? And writing a Bluetooth stack for Windows Mobile devices... that's probably as boring as implementing Quicksort now, isn't it? Or working on the new Visual Studio Team System source control software... that's cake, since we all know how to implement a simple, scalable revision control system, right?

Here's a thought. Maybe -- just maybe -- your brief interview experience did not expose you to some of the cutting edge work that Microsoft is doing...

They don't even use C++. No, I don't mean they use C#. They use C and lots of reference-counted pointers. No STL at all. Windows is really pretty ugly inside. If you are programmer with very high standards, you aren't going to like it.

Thousands of software engineers working on C code are collectively rolling their eyes right now.

If you think that "high standards" require use of C++ and the STL, then you might want to rethink why you didn't get that offer. Here's a hint: software engineering is not about the language, but how you use it.

Unless they've rewritten it lately, the Linux kernel is written in C. BSD is C as well. In fact, most modern operating systems were written (and are now extended and maintained) in C. I suppose your conclusion about Windows applies to those systems as well?

Oh wait, I almost forgot... while interviewing, you had a chance to skim all 50+ million lines of code in Windows and determine that they were ugly. I guess we'll just take your word for it, then.