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Is Gentoo in crisis?

It all started with a blog post by Daniel Robbins. That was on January 11. But of course, it didn't really start there. That's just when the internal furor over the revocation of the Gentoo Foundation's corporate license became public. Developers had been trying to figure out what to do in the internal gentoo-core mailing list for about a week, and as such things do, it leaked.

The larger-scale problems didn't even start there. The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter hasn't been posted for 13 weeks, and the Gentoo homepage hadn't seen any changes in the same amount of time. Furthermore, Gentoo's second release of 2007, dubbed 2007.1, never happened and on Monday was announced canceled.

What do these problems mean? Is Gentoo collapsing? Another blog post by Daniel Robbins suggests part of the answer—serious communication problems exist between developers and the rest of the Gentoo community. The relevant aspect here is that developers are so focused on working in their little areas that they fail to tell the world what they're doing. Everyone wants to develop, and nobody wants to spend time telling the world what's being developed. Most developers don't want to spend time doing anything but develop. In the same way, developers don't enjoy spending time dealing with "boring" issues like donations, copyright, tax returns, etc., nor are they generally any good at it.

Development remains active in the background—new versions of packages appear, bugs are fixed, the gentoo-dev mailing list is quite active, and so is IRC. Developers continue to blog on Planet Gentoo. But none of that is apparent to Gentoo users, who go to the homepage, read the weekly newsletter, and wait for the next release. To users, things can look like they're in stasis.

That's where Gentoo needs to concentrate its efforts: telling the world what developers are doing. To accomplish that, the project will either need to find new contributors interested in doing this or streamline its processes so that less effort is required to communicate (for example, automatically including Planet information or new versions from packages.gentoo.org on the homepage). Specifically, one hope with the foundation is to hand off the work to people who enjoy dealing with it, so developers can concentrate on development—people at Software in the Public Interest, or the Software Freedom Conservancy. An announcement on the Gentoo homepage proposing a move to a monthly newsletter brought nearly 20 offers of help in only 2 days, so it may be that the project hasn't been looking for non-development help in all the right places.

Gentoo isn't dying, but its developers need to tell that to the world.

Comments (9 posted)

New Releases

DesktopBSD 1.6

DesktopBSD, a project that uses both FreeBSD and the KDE desktop, has released version 1.6.

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Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring Alpha 2 "Neottia" released

Mandriva has released the second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2008.1, the spring edition. "This pre-release brings a near-final snapshot of KDE 4.0 (final 4.0 packages are currently being uploaded to the Cooker repositories), new NVIDIA and ATI drivers, the chance to test the experimental nouveau open source driver for NVIDIA cards, kernel 2.6.24rc7, and more."

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Hardy Alpha 3 released

Hardy Heron Alpha-3 has been released. Hardy will become Ubuntu 8.04. This release can be downloaded as Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu JeOS, Xubuntu and Gobuntu.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

Bits from the Debian i18n Meeting (Extremadura 2007)

Debian's i18n team met Caceres, Spain last month, thanks to the Junta de Extremadura. Click below for a summary of the meeting.

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Bits from the Qt/KDE team

Debian's Qt/KDE team also benefited from the meetings sponsored by the Government of Extremadura. During the meeting they decided that Lenny will ship with KDE 3. "However, we will close bugs filed against applications declared dead by upstream, such as aRts." A KDE 4 development platform will also ship with Lenny.

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Report from FOSS.in participation, Bangalore, India, Dec 2007

Christian Perrier has a report from FOSS.in which took place last month in Bangalore, India. "Sam Hocevar was attending the conference, as DPL, on behalf of Debian (travel expenses covered by Debian funds). Christian Perrier, wearing his i18n hat, proposed self as a speaker as well after sollicitations from the Debian-in community (travel expenses sponsored by FOSS.in organizers)."

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Fedora

Paul Frields to be Fedora project leader

Outgoing Fedora leader Max Spevack has sent a goodbye letter of sorts from FUDCon and announced that the new project leader will be Paul Frields. "Many of you already know Paul. He has been part of the Fedora community since 2003, not long after the Red Hat Linux Project officially merged with the original Fedora.us. Paul has worked with Fedora's documentation, packaging, marketing, news, and artwork teams. He also served as one of the inaugural members of the Fedora Project Board."

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Gentoo Linux

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

The Gentoo Foundation lost its charter a few weeks ago, causing Daniel Robbins, founder of Gentoo, to offer to return as President of the foundation. His offer comes with a number of conditions, not least of which is that the current trustees resign in favor of those he chooses. "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." No word yet on a response from the current trustees.

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Mandriva Linux

Mandriva and Turbolinux create Manbo-Labs

Mandriva and Turbolinux have announced the creation of a joint venture called "Manbo-Labs," the purpose of which is to create a common base distribution that both can build their products on. "Manbo-Labs' team is composed of more than ten developers from France, Japan, Brazil and also includes developers from the community. Altogether, they have been working on building a common Linux base system to be released in April 2008. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring will be based on this system."

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Slackware Linux

GNOME.SlackBuild (GSB) RC1 ready for testing

The first release candidate of GNOME.SlackBuild (GSB) is available for testing by Slackware 12.0 users. "Originally based on the Freerock GNOME project, GNOME.SlackBuild (GSB) provides the latest GNOME stable (2.20.3) binary packages and complete source build system for Slackware Linux."

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SUSE Linux and openSUSE

openSUSE Roadmap to 11.0

The openSUSE project has roadmap and schedule of the milestones in the journey to version 11.0. According to the schedule openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1 will be out later this week.

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Distribution Newsletters

Fedora Weekly News Issue 115

The Fedora Weekly News for January 7, 2008 includes "Fedora's way forward" by Max Spevack, Planet Fedora articles on "Transition", "Fedora marketing revitalization", "To all FUDCon attendees", "FUDCon 2008 - Day 2" and "FUDCon 2008 - Day 1", and much more.

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openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 5

The openSUSE Weekly News covers KDE 4.0 Released with openSUSE Packages and openSUSE-based live CD, openSUSE Shop Now Live, Lenovo delivers preloaded SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Temporary Download Failure, In Tips and Tricks: Webpin: Package Search from the Web or from your Shell, and several other topics.

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PCLinuxOS Magazine - Issue 17

The January 2008 edition of PCLinuxOS Magazine is out. Articles include Throwing Windows Out The Window, Common Information Commands, Help With Documentation, Howto Repair kdeinit Problems, It's Magic - PMagic, PCLinuxOS Based Distros - Update, Squeeze Your Data - A New Compression Strategy, and much more.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #73

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for January 12, 2008 looks at Hardy Alpha 3 released, Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Course, KDE 4.0, a new member and MOTUs, MOTU Council election, an upcoming Hug Day, Forums tutorial of the week, and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 235

The DistroWatch Weekly for January 14, 2008 is out. "The release of KDE 4.0.0, the deepening crisis in Gentoo Linux and a series of announcements from the Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) dominated the headlines last week. As expected, the major new version from the popular desktop environment project received mixed reaction from distribution makers and users; while some distros were quick to release binary packages and special KDE 4 live CDs for users to sample the new code, it's clear that the first KDE 4 release is far from ready to take over our desktops. Also in this issue, openSUSE has published a roadmap leading towards the upcoming release of version 11.0 and VectorLinux has announced the first 64-bit edition of its Slackware-based distribution."

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