Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return [LWN.net]

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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Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 16:47 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (3 responses)

Okay, I'm confused. How exactly did Gentoo lose its charter? According to the article it was "revoked". Who revoked it? Under whose/what authority? Thanks!

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 16:56 UTC (Mon) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] (1 responses)

For the clueless among us, what exactly is a "charter" and what does it mean if you lose it?

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 17:16 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

I thought it was a typo (char[ac]ter)...

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 17:22 UTC (Mon) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]

The State Of New Mexico (Who issued the charter) requires certain paperwork to be filed in a
timely manner.  The Gentoo Foundation Trustees failed to file said paperwork, and the state
revoked the charter.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 17:21 UTC (Mon) by no_hope (guest, #44983) [Link] (4 responses)

I think they mean that the Gentoo Foundation's non-profit organization charter has been
revoked. This means that legally Gentoo Foundation is a nonentity now. Not sure what the
practical implications are though.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 17:47 UTC (Mon) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link] (3 responses)

In Illinois at least, you have to be almost actively irresponsible to 
disincorporate a nonprofit. They give you several months warning, and the 
late filing fee is less than ten dollars. And I've heard the IRS is 
similarly forgiving. I guess their assumption is that if a nonprofit 
screws up, its incompetence, but if a for-profit screws up, its malice. 
Because if you were competent, you'd be in it for the money. /sarcasm

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 18:02 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

If you don't have day-to-day operations, and so you don't have physical space and a postal
address that belongs to the organization, and most of the trustees lose interest in some way
or other, and you don't do business by postal mail routinely, it wouldn't be too hard to
become unreachable by the state indefinitely without realizing it until the state does
something publicly visible and somebody happens to notice.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 15, 2008 18:20 UTC (Tue) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link] (1 responses)

If you're a corporation, non-profit or not, you are required to have a Registered Agent with a
physical address to not only receive mailings, etc., but also to be the person to whom court
papers are served (i.e., in case they are sued and the paperwork has to be hand-delivered to a
human).  So regardless of Robbins' message, it sounds like the people running the Foundation
were not doing a very sound job of it.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 15, 2008 19:03 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I suspect that Robbins is the Registered Agent, as one of the properties of being listed as
President in the state's records, and his registered address is probably out-of-date (since I
think he's changed jobs and locations since he was supposed to not be President, if nothing
else).

But, again, I think that it's because corporations normally have day-to-day operations that
their President has to be involved in that forces them to keep this information accurate in
general.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 17:45 UTC (Mon) by wblew (subscriber, #39088) [Link]

As a minimum, it demonstrates that the current foundation trustees failed in their duty.

NM PRC Documents

Posted Jan 14, 2008 17:51 UTC (Mon) by lurk546 (guest, #17438) [Link]


Tne New Mexico Public Regulation Commission has a "Corporate Information Inquiry Page"
available at:
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nmprc.state.nm.us/...

The Information for the Gentoo Foundation is available at
http://www.nmprc.state.nm.us/cgi-bin/ft11.pl?scc=2463313
http://www.nmprc.state.nm.us/cgi-bin/prcdtl.cgi?2463313+G...

Per Daniel Robbins' blog he asked the foundation to update the contact information. This
apparently was not done. If the NM PRC is like other state agencies the current foundation may
have really tried and been unsuccessful.

Loss of incorporation makes it much harder to get donations, open bank accounts, etc. Maybe
the Gentoo Foundation moved their incorporation to another state, it's hard to say without
digging into it further. Apparently the gentoo-core mailing list has more information. I'll
try and look into it more tonight.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 18:19 UTC (Mon) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (2 responses)

This is a good thing. Over the past year or so Gentoo has stagnated. It still works and is a
good distribution, it's just that the developer talent is spread very thin so bugs linger, new
packages don't get added and generally the infrastructure struggles to keep up.

I welcome Daniel Robbins, hopefully he can help the situation.

do NOT trust him

Posted Jan 14, 2008 19:04 UTC (Mon) by sylware (guest, #35259) [Link] (1 responses)

He is not to be trusted. Indeed he worked for Microsoft and nowadays he pushes hard Microsoft
based technologies.
He "founded" gentoo, but he was not him who brought gentoo where it is since he was kind of
"evicted" from "power" a loooong time ago.
Gentoo is the main source based distro, and there, proprietary software cannot match that much
flexibility. And let's keep .net(mono) optional in gentoo gnome (the ONLY mainstream distro
which offers such luxury...).
More over, gentoo does not need a new president and a full new team, just some late paperwork
to be done.

do NOT trust him

Posted Jan 15, 2008 19:45 UTC (Tue) by mrfredsmoothie (guest, #3100) [Link]

He "founded" gentoo, but he was not him who brought gentoo where it is since he was kind of "evicted" from "power" a loooong time ago.

That may be, but I agree w/ the post you're responding to that Gentoo has stagnated: they never released a 2007.1 release, the graphical installer for their 2007.0 release didn't work and the manual install instructions appeared to be out of date.

I agree that it's still a powerful, quality distro but IMHO it needs some kind of injection of focus or quality. Whether or not drobbins is the right person to provide that is another question.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 19:05 UTC (Mon) by purslow (guest, #8716) [Link] (4 responses)

I've been happily using Gentoo since 2003 & know of no "crisis".
For a non-profit to forget to file legal paperwork is rarely fatal
& has nothing at all to do with the day-to-day activities of Gentoo.

Robbins' blogs sound like a man who is badly out of touch with reality
or who has a private agenda whose main beneficiary would be himself.
He offers no external reference for his negative claims about Gentoo
& gives only the vaguest idea of what he would do if restored as Fuehrer.

Robbins' words quoted in OSNews.com in 2002 are significant:
"I very much want to find a way to turn the Gentoo Linux project
into a profitable enterprise.  My main motivation in wanting to do this
is so I can stop living from paycheck to paycheck ... ".

Having failed to achieve that, he left for a big US software monopoly,
where he lasted all of 8 months (May 2005 - Jan 2006).  After that,
ZDNet reported (060214) that he had accepted a job as the CTO
of ABC Coding Solutions (Albuquerque NM USA), which provided
information products & consulting services within the health industry.
Apparently, his current CV lists yet another employer in another field.
All in all, he sounds like a man with a very patchy employment record,
who continues to have trouble finding a lasting career anywhere.

Last year he was welcomed back to Gentoo, but after a couple of days
started a big flame war with an ex-dev & left again within a week,
a flame war which incidentally he used (via a friend at Distro Watch)
to generate a lot of negative publicity against Gentoo.

Correct was one of Gentoo's most solid citizens, Chris Gianelloni,
[ZDNet 2006], "reluctant to comment on Robbins' latest career move,
but said that it would not impact the project: 'While Daniel was
a strong proponent of Gentoo back in his heyday, he's been away from us
long enough for his actions not to impact us in any way'".

Why is Gentoo incorporated in New Mexico
(apart from the fact that it's Robbins' home state) ?
At least a large minority -- probably a majority -- of devs & users
do not live in the USA & some more appropriate centre needs to be found.
And why does Gentoo need trustees ?  Could we learn from Debian ?

There has been no "recent crisis", as Robbins claims in his blog.
Gentoo software continues to be reliable & upto-date,
thanks to the conscientious work of about 300 developers.
The really big Gentoo news item this week is
that a serious-minded volunteer intends to restart 'Gentoo Monthly News'.

I'm sorry to see LWN publicising Robbins' self-serving propaganda.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 20:23 UTC (Mon) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link]

> I've been happily using Gentoo since 2003 & know of no "crisis".

Daniel Robbins, IMHO, would *not* make a good leader for today's Gentoo. However, he is right
about one thing: over the past year, Gentoo's current leadership achieved many embarrassing
failures. It has failed to release 2007.1, it has failed to publish the newsletter, it spent
many weeks fixing a critical server that got hacked, and, worst of all, experienced developers
continue leaving the project. How can you say that there is no crisis when the front page of
gentoo.org has not been updated for months! Losing non-profit status in New Mexico is just the
icing on the many-layered cake of incompetence.

It's no wonder that 90% of Gentoo forum users are voting[1] for the dictatorship...

[1] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-644321.html

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 20:55 UTC (Mon) by wilreichert (guest, #17680) [Link] (1 responses)

Then why only a single release in 2007?  Seems like a big indicator to me not all the gears
are turning properly.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 15, 2008 1:07 UTC (Tue) by dberkholz (guest, #23346) [Link]

Tons of security updates happened during the second half of the year, forcing full rebuilds
and retests of the release media every time. This causes major holdups, particularly since the
release has to wait for all architectures (even the slow ones).

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 20:57 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

> I'm sorry to see LWN publicising Robbins' self-serving propaganda.

I don't see LWN as "publicising Robbins' self-serving propaganda", but rather making its readers aware of current news events and issues in the Linux/Open Source community. And, while I agree that Gentoo can (and presumably will) restart its charter, I think that the lapse in the charter is symptomatic of a bigger issue at Gentoo - and LWN is simply reporting what it considers newsworthy.

Also, I'm not trying to defend Daniel Robbins; from what I've read about him, he's a brilliantly talented developer who has trouble getting along with others.

Let's fix Gentoo's problems.

Posted Jan 14, 2008 22:03 UTC (Mon) by csawtell (guest, #986) [Link] (1 responses)

I have been using Gentoo since Version 1.2. I forget the exact date but it's been many years.

It's true that Gentoo seems to have lurched from crisis to crisis, but in spite of that perception, for a user, it is a remarkably effective Linux distribution. I look around at other Linux and Unix distribution and have yet to find one which fits my needs better than Gentoo does.

If Gentoo has a problem it's that the developers mailing list has been populated by too many, shall we say, "overtly frank" individuals. It is a truly international forum and suffers from that. Misunderstandings abound. The Americans use taboo four letter words in much the same way as the rest of the world uses punctuation characters. The folks who live East of the Rhine transliterate directly from their mother tongues to English and tell it exactly as it is. The British and Americans are still separated a million miles by their common language. In many ways it's a miracle that the list 'works' at all, but amazingly it does. If everybody took a moment to re-read their words before they pressed the 'Send' button, realized that humour doesn't cross cultural boundaries, and finally put on their elephant hide suits, then the Gentoo developers list might become a happier and more constructive place.

Watching the Google "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)" video should be a condition of list membership.

Recently, a number of very competent developers have found that living in this linguistic cauldron to be a great deal less than fun and have, very understandably, become disenchanted with the emotional atmosphere and jumped out.

Let's fix Gentoo's problems.

Posted Jan 15, 2008 18:49 UTC (Tue) by marduk (guest, #3831) [Link]

I agree with this.  I've also been a Gentoo user since 1.2.  As an former Gentoo developer, I
would also say that Larry has become a headless schizophrenic.  Yet despite all this Gentoo
(the distro) has miraculously continued to serve its users well. 

Now if we can only fix Larry...