Read what he actually says

Posted Jul 3, 2003 23:11 UTC (Thu) by bgilbert (subscriber, #4738)
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Folks, it's worth reading what Zachary Welch and Geert Bevin actually have to say. IMHO the LWN summary doesn't quite capture their argument, which seems to be that Gentoo publicly claims to be an open, developer-run organization, while in fact being a for-profit corporation managed by a small, closed group of people on semi-secret mailing lists. (Note that it's gentoo.org, not gentoo.com, and their website actively solicits donations.) They further argue that this ruling cabal often makes decisions for political or personal, rather than technical, reasons.

As a recent (partial) convert from Debian, I find this possibility rather disturbing indeed. A quick skim of the announcements released by both sides leaves me reminded of the recent XFree86 incident, except more clear-cut. If Gentoo's controlling body is undercutting its developers (as they claim) and if a fork is the only way to solve the problem, then a fork should happen, so that (a version of) Gentoo can be developed in a properly open setting.