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!

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.

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: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