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

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 19:05 UTC (Mon) by purslow (guest, #8716)
Parent article: Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

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.

to post comments

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 20:23 UTC (Mon) by tetromino (subscriber, #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.