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Gentoo in Crisis, Robbins Offers Solution
mrbadbar writes "Gentoo Linux founder Daniel Robbins says Gentoo's leadership is in crisis. 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.' Robbins offers a solution: his return as President of the Gentoo Foundation. According to Robbins: 'If I return as President, I will preserve the not-for-profit aspect of Gentoo. Beyond this, you can expect everything to be very, very different than how things are today.'"
The emerge of the upgraded management package failed? Did you remember to set the right USE flags?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
$ emerge leadership
Not too many folks could pen such an offer with out tossing in the phrase "tail between your legs" somewhere.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
I RTFA but I have no idea what the problem actually is that he is going to solve. Could someone explain?
I left gentoo some time ago due to severe problems. Let me sum up the most problematic ones: 1. Package system becoming VERY VERY slow because of the amount db size. 2. No sane way to upgrade properly without doing several rounds of breaking and fixing library dependencies 3. USE flags change all the time and often leave the apps crippled if you don't set it up "just" right (try PHP) 4. No automatic way to uninstall a package and have the system automatically remove the unused ones. 5. Very very slow upgrade cycle for major packages (KDE is a good example)
I think gentoo has some incredible flexibility and it'd be a shame to see the project go by the wayside.
There's a sticky post in the gentoo forums dealing with this. So far Daniel got a pretty positive response and frankly... as a user that has seen gentoo slowly falling apart over the past few years, I'm glad he's motivated to bring it back on track: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-644321.html
Everytime you kill a kitten, god masturbates.
It's strange how people think Gentooers are into Gentoo for the '--fomg-optimize' thing...
... people are much less likely to offer that since writing an ebuild is easy, but compiling that stuff for different archs is actually not that easy.
.deb of the new Firefox Beta 3. Anyone willing to point me to one?
I had to leave Gentoo a few weeks ago because my Laptop couldn't take the massive compiles anymore - my desks are all FreeBSD btw. What I enjoyed about Gentoo was the ports-like package manager and the ability to carefully choose your dependencies via USE-flags. Here I am, back on Debian, and I think it's actually faster... but I don't really care about speed since I exclusively use XMonad and the console - no need for speed improvements on a 1.6 GHz machine with that.
But what I hate is that I don't have overlays anymore. You could dynamically replace any part of your package repository with something you found on the net. Like the proaudio overlay. Or the Haskell overlay. With Debian, this is much harder, as you have to find someone on the Net that will offer his repo of binaries
For example, I still didn't find any place that offers a
The speed is only a minor advantage of Gentoo and manifests itself in the much shorter start up times and the ability to easily switch to baselayout2 or einit to even improve that one. But since the average uptime of my laptop is about 2-3 weeks, I don't really care if Debian takes 20 seconds longer to boot up.
I'm an infovore...
Except that Gentoo happens to be one of the best. Maybe if one of the dozens of Red Hat clones using the same crappy RPM system died, nobody would miss it, but... Gentoo is too important. Even the non-Gentoo users I know rely on the Gentoo forums and wiki and documentation for help.
Reality is fluffy!
No. I think diversity in Linux is a Good Thing. There are hundreds of distros out there and that's really good to see, because they're all competing with each other, sharing their work with each other, forking one another and then merging back... If a distro dies, ten new ones spawn. That's very good, it contributes to a diversity which makes the Linux community an interesting place to live in.
... as long as it's not RPM-based...
And that 'but it confuses the newbies' argument just doesn't cut it anymore. For the complete boons, there's Ubuntu and probably SuSE. For everyone else, there's choice. I like choice. Right now I chose Debian, but that has changed in the past and will probably change in the future.
I'm an infovore...
Gentoo was my way of learning a lot about linux sysadmining in a short time. In a couple weeks, I learned how to compile packages, manage partition issues, compile kernels, deal with numerous config files, and many other skills. I later switched to Ubuntu, but I still appreciate my time spent with gentoo as a great learning aid. Just enough help to make it not as hard as LFS, but hard enough to be challenging.
Warning, knife is sharp. Please keep out of children.
When you have experienced this, come back and comment.
Of course Gentoo or Slackware or the like will work fine, but in these days of fast processors and cheap memory, why not just use a Debian based Linux like Ubuntu WITH a GUI, and let some one else compile the thing.
Slackware is package based, although I will admit that the packages do not perform checks for required packages. I only know one person that re-compiles Slackware by hand, but he is a bit eccentric. Most of us only compile packages when they are not included in the distro, when they are not compiled with the options we want, or when we re-compile the kernel.
It seems odd to lump Slackware and Gentoo together since most of the people that I know who use Slackware are more server centric than desktop centric and prefer stable software that does not change. Most Gentoo users I know are desktop centric and want the latest greatest untested software. This is reflected in the different methodology of the two distros.
I would also like to point out that Slackware has been around longer than Debian and Slackware produces stable releases faster than one every two to three years. Although Debian is a decent distro, there are other decent distros as well. I could argue that a Torx screw is better than a roofing nail, but it really depends on the job at hand.
The reason for this offer from Daniel is imho not as important as it is that he is offering to step up back as the leader of this project and take his job down to part time so that he again can put some energy into the role as leader of Gentoo Linux. ... though I fear that might happen once again.
Gentoo badly needs some leadership right now, Daniel has done it well before and had Gentoo thriving while he still was at the helm, so let's get him back there and get this ship back on course.
I really hope that the council will accept this offer for the best of Gentoo and not let their personal agendas stand in the way of the good of Gentoo
that he wants an answer in 7 days. There's no way that your $emerge leadership package will compile and install by then.
Gentoo's approach of configuring and compiling at point of install should - in theory - solve this problem. You can adjust what gets compiled with what options and can therefore tailor the solution exactly to what you need. This is great for some of the more complicated packages, where there are many optional components, some of which may be mutually exclusive. This is also great when you have packages that - if you compile in everything - the package become unwieldy and sluggish.
In practice, the maze of options and the staggering number of potential compiler flags for tuning things -- it's simply too complicated for the majority of users and even for a very large number of software engineers. A better solution, in my opinion, is to have users describe a basic distribution and the platform on which it is to run, and then have a central cluster use herustics to grind out a way to achieve it.
Personally, I'd do this by compiling a mini distro locally that used a very standard package manager and didn't invalidate assumptions by mainstream distributions also using that package manager. Then the user could use existing repositories to add the stuff that's not critical to them but they still want. Alternatively, the cluster could spit out all of the necessary scripts, databases and configuration files for a Gentoo-style distro to build that perfect foundation.
However, ultimately, I do believe this to be the area virtually all distros get it wrong. The foundation components are the most critical, but they are also the least reusable. Correct that and you correct 99% of the (few) problems people have with Linux.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Gentoo is subject to the same problem in reverse - except it's far more annoying and time consuming.
.so rev bump. Now you need to use revdep-rebuild to track down every package that links against openssl (i.e. anything important) and recompile them. If any of these packages are more than a minor revision or two behind what's currently in portage the only way to rebuild them is to pull the ebuild from /var/db/pkg and copy it into the portage tree manually, then rebuild the digest and hope to god that portage can track down all of the source files or that they're still sitting in /usr/portage/distfiles. In the meantime you'd better hope that you're either on a dev box (luxury!) or nobody sneezes, since everything that needs the package that was so bumped is now running off cached filesystem data.
This scenario has happened to me multiple times on production systems:
Updates get pushed out, glsa-check notifies you of some critical patch to openssl or whatever, you go to do the upgrade only to discover that the new version has a
It's a lot of fun.
I left Gentoo for FreeBSD due to these reasons and also due to waiting for certain packages for too long, then receiving buggy packages and finally, having the base config change several times in 6 months, mainly for apache2, php, etc. After spending a week with FreeBSD I don't think I'll be back to Gentoo for any reason.
> it seems obvious that there comes a point where diluting the development effort
This nonsense argument about dilluting effort gets repeated over and over. How exactly is it "obvious" that if I do something the way I think is the best, and work independently of the few "majors", I am dilluting the work of somebody else? Its called competition, and, as I least heard about it, it promotes diversity and is rather healthy for a ecosystem of any kind. There is no reason why there shouldnt be extreme diversity in the software landscape. You and your likes seem to suffer from some kind of software xenophobia. How exactly does some obscure source based distro you never heard of, make _you_ counterproductive? Using your reasoning Linux and the BSDs shouldnt even exist because theyre dilluting somebody else's windows based "development efforts".
As has been discussed before, Gentoo isn't an enterprise production OS... in fact, it's not totally ideal for even a single server in a small shop.
.tar.gz source files they download from sourceforge. You don't hear people bitching about Linux from scratch. The nice thing about Gentoo over LSF is that it automates a lot of the process for you and allows you to set up your system by itself, without the aide of another machine to get the system bootstrapped and initially configured. Sure, some gentoo users are cocky; but they're cocky in the same way that a guy who built his own Camarro acts around their buddy who just bought his new, shiny Saturn.
The thing about gentoo is that it gives you super-fine grained control over your packages. You want ldap support? want to not support jpeg, but to support png? do you want the package installed, but omit all the X11 bullshit? Or how about keeping a specific version of a package from upgrading when you upgrade your system? That's the power of gentoo's package management system.
Gentoo also offers insight into the innerworkings of the linux OS. You get to build your own kernel and pick EXACTLY what gets installed.
Since Gentoo is frequently on the bleeding edge, it's great for testing out new versions of applications. One of the downsides of CentOS that I've encountered was the fact that subversion isn't quite up to date, and it took several months before vim7 was in the yum repository. Of course, you could add new repositories to yum, or download an RPM specificly of what you want, but that sometimes involves waiting for someone to make the RPM or finding the repository that has what you need.
Another downside of Gentoo, especially in a production environment, is that since it's bleeding edge, many things in the system are changing and usually with a frequency that defies belief. I've been running Gentoo on my own two personal servers (hosting my websites and mysql and DNS and stuff) for nearly 5 years. The sheer number of times that I've booted the machine after doing an 'emerge -u world' and gotten "this configuration file's syntax is depricated, please use this new syntax instead" messages has been infuriating. Routine upgrades aren't routine. You can spend hours picking through config files and manually inspecting the diffs between versions. You don't want Gentoo on your server unless you enjoy spending a day doing an upgrade.
Gentoo is ideal for embedded projects and systems that aren't going to change. The OS lends itself well to projects such as DVRs and controller OSs for robotics. It's small and runs on a lot of different hardwares.
I'm always amazed at how much hate people have for gentoo because you have to build it yourself, but you don't hear people getting mad about the
Gentoo is an exercise in academia. For a user new to Linux who wants to get a feel for the ins and outs and get used to the commandline really fast, gentoo is for them.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
The alternative in that situation is to 'take the plunge' and upgrade all the dependent packages to the latest (presumably stable, as if you are running ~arch then they would likely not be behind) version in portage. As you are talking about production systems, it makes sense to have testing systems which are kept (reasonably) up-to-date so that you do not get (many) unpleasant surprises when updating the live production systems.
The best thing is that it's right on your computer, just a couple of commands away:
Remember to modify the debian/DEBIAN/control file to look like it makes sense, pretty much like this
While it's not like downloading a
Oh and yes, you could just untar firefox in
Yes and us Slackware users divert that chaos through /dev/random increasing our cryptographic key generation abilities.
Seriously I have used Slackware since before ver 3 and have never seen chaos from dependancy issues. You make it sound like it crashes computers at random. But as someone who actually knows how it works I can tell you this, all a unresolved dependancy issue does is stop a specific program from running until that dependancy is met. If foo needs bar then the system does not crash foo just complains and exits. This is Linux not Window95.
I'm sorry, but that is total crap. I have been using Gentoo on production servers which I *do* keep current using stable (not bleeding-edge) packages. This is a large shop with many servers. I have never looked back since switching to Gentoo. Everyone who moans about emerges failing and having to run revdep-rebuild often must be doing something wrong. I've had to run revdep-rebuild once when I upgraded libexpat. So what? It took like 2 minutes.
Don't make sweeping statements if you don't know what you are doing. I run Gentoo on my servers and I run Gentoo on my personal desktop and and laptop and have *NO* problems with it. The next time you feel like bashing it, try it first and this time RTFM. Sheesh....
I've was using Gentoo since pre version 1.0, I've submitted ebuilds that got accepted in portage and was a contributer at heart. I noticed a big change when Daniel Robbins stepped down, a big enough change to get me to drop the use of Gentoo.
I would love to welcome Daniel Robbins back and and I wish there was a way to allow community vote.
On my server most of the time i find that etc-update takes care of most of the config file updates. If you have config files you want to protect from minor updates use CONFIG_PROTECT in make.conf to protect specific files. Then the majority of config updates flagged with etc-update are ones which you don't need to read over like tweaks to init scripts or such like. I find my config updates are usually over in a few minutes.
The thing i don't like about gentoo is that after a few years of repeatedly upgrading my system using emerge and building new kernels around new hardware and stuff i have started to feel really isolated from any sense of community or identity gentoo may have. I'm not the kinda guy who hangs out on IRC all the time but with other distros i've used in the past i've really had a sense of direction of where the distro is headed in the future and the grand goal of the project. Gentoo just seems to be like that lazy teenager whos just bumming away his life with no plans for the future.
overall though i think its one of the best distros i've used from a low resources server perspective. It still works after 4 without having to scrap it and start again so i'm not going to switch no matter how lethargic its attitude may feel.
How many computers are too many?
Actually, Gentoo is one of the two distros I see most commonly offered to newbies, the other one being Ubuntu, of course. Those newbies who want an "it just works" distro get Ubuntu while those who have specific needs such as a shell-only test box on old hardware are told to get Gentoo. Even if Portage is getting slow, it's still so much more useful than everything else out there that most advanced users I know tend to gravitate towards it because they are averse to the ridiculous dependency graphs binary -ased package managers tend to generate.
Also, Gentoo is the best-documented distro out there with Gentoo HOWTOs often containing very useful information even for non-Gentoo users. It's pretty much irrelevant what you intend to do on your Linux box, a google for [subject matter] gentoo will usually give yu a detailed description of what you need to do.
Gentoo is much more than the ricer distro many people see in it.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
In college I was big into Gentoo. It had it's problems, sure, but when you got it working, it was terrific. Then after the college days were over, and I started working, I had a lot less free time. I realized that with Gentoo I spend a lot more time working on the computer itself as opposed to using the computer to do other things. I've switched to Ubuntu, and haven't looked back since.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Who cares? The GP's script was just three lines of comments, anyway.
MyDixieWrecked, you present a reasonable picture of what Gentoo is good at. Thank you for that. The problem is that too many Gentoo advocates out there are asses about the choice they made. Here's an all too frequent scenario. You're discussing a problem in Ubuntu or Fedora, trying to help someone get the system running correctly. Then, a Gentoo advocate comes by, screams "Ubuntu (or Fedora) is teh suxx0rs! Gentoo, FTW" and then tries to convince every one and their pets with juvenile arguments that Gentoo is the best distribution out there, irrespective of what the end user's needs may be. (Yeah, I'll put my mother on Gentoo.)
Most likely, such Gentoo advocates form a minority of Gentoo users but they form a vocal minority. The problem with such vocal minorities is that they often are so vocal that people start thinking that these minorities represent the view of the majority. I think a fair amount of the "hate people have for gentoo" comes from interaction with those jackasses.
Someone might ask what about Fedora users acting like jackasses or Ubuntu users, or Slackware users. Well, those exist too but somehow Gentoo jackasses seem more frequent to me.
I've had to run revdep-rebuild once or twice; because of expat and one other package, but in the last 5 years, gentoo has changed their config syntax for networks and the way that pam works with ldap logins. I've had to do big jumps in kernel upgrades because of lack of support of features I use in iptables which caused me to have to upgrade to udev from devfs, and I've had several other weekend's worth jobs because of config file and package deprication.
The reason that I say that Gentoo isn't ideal for production is because of these changes that are made. If you want to stay relatively up to date in your packages (for security reasons), it can be a pretty big pain to keep up with config changes. The measures that you can implement to protect your config files aren't always great since sometimes a minor upgrade will incorporate some new configuration option (I've seen this in apache, php and ldap on several occasions).
Rolling your own enterprise-level server management application, I think, would be easiest on gentoo because so much of the system is exposed and it is so straight forward, but my point in my original post is that for production, you'd like a reasonably stable implementation of configuration and some way of keeping my old setup until I'm ready to do a full revamp of my machine.
I didn't bash gentoo. I'm a gentoo user and I like it a lot... I just wouldn't use it for contract jobs or at my real job (sysadmin of around 130 machines); for that, I'd rather use CentOS.
As an aside... although I do enjoy building my own kernel, it can be time consuming and doing large jumps (I've gone from 2.6.4 to 2.6.12 to 2.6.19) can be a real pain in the ass to remember to properly enable all options. I've got an issue right now where the current kernel will not boot my machine and after dozens of attempts, I haven't been able to solve it. I've got several unsolved posts in the gentoo forums about this... the downside is that I'm running gentoo on PPC hardware, so I don't have the largest pool of people to help troubleshoot.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
no no, it'll be ok. slashcode just needs some USE flags.
I'm glad you mentioned that, as it's bitten me more than once in the past.
Gentoo is great to experiment with, and provided you can keep the system bang up to date (and live with occasional breakage), fine. But many of us aren't prepared to make that sacrifice.
On the plus side, maybe as a result of this, it's produced a very helpful community. Much more so than many other distributions.
Or you use your dev machine to build binary packages of everything you need and then have your production machines install those packages. Think of Gentoo more as a distribution -builder- instead. I have 1 box building for dozens. -J
Other posters have mentioned some possible ways of building from source. For me, at least if the source package is from Debian official, it's a matter of `apt-get source PACKAGE`, then `cd DIR; fakeroot debian/build binary`. If you have the prerequisite development packages install the package should build cleanly and you'll have the newly compiled binary packages ready for installation.
[By the way..... claiming that building debs from source is "harder" because you "don't know how to build Debs" is not terribly convincing...]
Don't quote me on this.
it is hard to switch back to a binary distro after gentoo, but the parent has a point in that gentoo gets harder and harder to manage. That's why I started looking for alternatives and found Gobolinux, a distro that makes it really easy for mantainers and admins. It is a fresh air in the unix world.
www.gobolinux.org
-- EOF
Your post reminds me of some of the (very) old slashdot stories asking the question of how non-technical/non-programmers can help the F/OSS movements. The response usually came in the for of "there's lots of stuff like documentation (real writing, not tech writing), art, etc, that are also needed."
This was and is true, but I think another big category was forgotten: management. That for a good project to succeed, the techies should keep doing techie stuff, and be shielded from politics and dull aspects of business as much as possible.[*] This Gentoo problem is a prefect example of this. The techies don't want to do business, so that's an area that non-techie people could really help.
I hope the pull through with this, regardless of the solution - I would hate to have to switch to another distro...
[*] - See: Brokes and the MMM, where he talks about the "surgical team"
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
I've been using Gentoo on production servers (and my desktop) since the first year it was out. It used to be a very solid project. It still has much better documentation than, say, Ubuntu. Originally the speed of the custom-compiled stuff was important to me, because of lower-end hardware of the time I had in use - which it did well on (once compiled, of course). The other main virtue, compared to Red Hat or Debian or Slackware of the time, was that it was easier to keep an up-to-date server running without having to do a fresh OS install every year or two.
But over the last year especially Gentoo has gone into steep decline. Upgrades of major stuff come with "upgrade guides" that leave out major things that commonly get broken. The Gentoo bugzilla is manned by kids who compete to close bugs while insulting the intelligence of anyone who'd dare file them. Older libraries which take little space and conflict with nothing are removed without choice or warning when newer packages are installed, and it's just tough if your production server has stuff installed doing useful work that depends on those libraries. Meanwhile the Ubuntu project has worked very hard to become the most-safely-upgradeable Linux (I'd imagine Red Hat must have improved too; but I hate rpms too much to want to try it again). And hardware is so fast now that for standard server stuff there's much less to gain from customized compilation.
For those who say that Gentoo is fine if you just keep a spare system to test upgrades on first, that's bull. Stuff will break on nearly-identical servers that are just slightly different in their versions - that is, going from 1.17 to 1.19 on a app may break, while going from 1.17 to 1.18 to 1.19 works fine. And the breakage can show up tangentially, not just where you'd most expect it. So you'd have to keep a test server for each production server, and very carefully keep it just one step ahead in sync. Plus you'd need to keep it under some sort of dummy load, since some breakage only becomes apparent in production, not in idle use. The real solution there would be for Gentoo to start being responsive to its bugzilla reports again, immediately fixing any breakage caused by new packages so that instead of letting hundreds or thousands of people trip over the same stone, the paths are kept free and clear.
If Robbins comes back, Gentoo could shine again. If he doesn't, it's about over.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Amen to that! We run our servers on gentoo as well
Frag 'em all...
I've built several things from Sid on Ubuntu Gutsy by following these instructions from Debian's FAQ:
../foo_version-revision_arch.deb
7.13 How do I install a source package?
Debian source packages can't actually be "installed", they are just unpacked in whatever directory you want to build the binary packages they produce.
Source packages are distributed on most of the same mirrors where you can obtain the binary packages. If you set up your APT's sources.list(5) to include the appropriate "deb-src" lines, you'll be able to easily download any source packages by running
apt-get source foo
To help you in actually building the source package, Debian source package provide the so-called build-dependencies mechanism. This means that the source package maintainer keeps a list of other packages that are required to build their package. To see how this is useful, run
apt-get build-dep foo
before building the source.
If you want just to compile the package, you may cd into foo-version directory and issue the command
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
to build the package (note that this also requires the fakeroot package), and then
dpkg -i
to install the newly-built package(s).
I've tried doing that in the past but have wound up with errors. I believe it's because my servers are both PPC and it seems that features appear and disappear and get renamed between versions, at least between gaps of 5+ versions. Going from 2.6.12 to the latest will not work at all. there are an enormous amount of new features that require enabling.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Moderation isn't enough. These jerks need to be flayed.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'm long time gentoo user ( I've started around version 1.4) and am more or less stisfied with it. I mean, it definitely has its flaws, but I haven't been able to find substitution that could "scratch my itch".
I have tried Ubuntu as everyone around me were advocating it, but found that while it has much prettier installer and things tend to work out of the box, deep down it's actually inferior to Gentoo.
When things work smoothly in Ubuntu, everyone is quick to point out those maybe few minutes and a CLI command that Ubuntu has spared you, but no one mentions those cases when things don't work.
Each distro has its framework which combines many pieces of open source mosaic, but things get interesting when some piece in mosaic develops a flaw that is not immediately obvious or it affects some portion of users. I don't care for a few seconds spared during installation nearly as much I care for infrastructure support in cases that don't work.
WRT to Gentoo's imminent death:
1. If its going to happen, it won't be soon.
2. All problems of Gentoo can be traced to its origins. At the time, its creator found his pleasure in homebrew approach and wanted to have something that works in some way much rather than trying to get it right first time and also answer many organisational, commercial and law questions.
So now we have Gentoo Organisation, Infrastructure and Distro in the state of Russian Orbital station MIR jsut before its death: there are many interleaving and intervening systems with many semi-documented patches and changes and whole shebang is far from original specs. I mean, evolution is a ni ce thing, but it has its limits. When it reaches its limits, maybe its time to use accumulated knowledge and experience to make something new...
3. WRT to Drobbins, I don't know the guy personally and have nothing against him, but I'm not sure that having him back is a good idea.
He had the chance but has proven unable to make Gentoo his life, so now he's coming back, faced with similar problems ( needing money for RL but being strawn between his hobby and bussiness) and unable to learn from his mistakes and use radically different solution this time.
4. New Gentoo should start from scratch with its policy, organisation and web/distro infrastructure while good old Gentoo I is living on...
I don't really think it's racism. I mean, race has nothing to do with the topic at hand. My suspicion is that these sorts of trolls only use that word because it is the most taboo of all words. It's one of the only words that can really get a reaction out of people, that can end careers. It is a word so powerful, that if it is used while committing a crime, the crime becomes many times more serious. That word is used because we, as a society, give it a special power.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.