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Daniel Robbins Resigns As Chief Gentoo Architect
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Apr 26, 2004 06:39 PM
from the bjorn-borg dept.
from the bjorn-borg dept.
bdowne01 writes "Gentoo Linux has experienced rapid growth in the past year--much to the credit of Daniel Robbins, the founder and Chief Architect of the project. Earlier today, he announced his resignation from his role on the gentoo-nfp mailing list."
Tester adds "But before leaving, he has set up a non-profit foundation that will own all of the copyrights to Gentoo. The initial board of trustees will be appointed by Daniel, but next year they will be elected. The membership of the foundation will be open." Reader burnitall points out a note on the Gentoo homepage reading "... We are extremely sad to see Daniel Robbins depart, and we both wish him the best in his new endeavors and promise that the door will always be open for his return." Robbins' message also indicates he hopes
to continue working on the release engineering aspect of Gentoo.
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Can't read the press release... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can't read the press release... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Can't read the press release... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:More Gentoo Instability (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:More Gentoo Instability (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I couldn't really care about the installer (and Gentoo doesn't actually have one). I value the performance, access to current releases, and freedom of configuration above all else. Gentoo excels at all three of those.
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Re:WHY MOST SLASHBOTS ARE NOT FUNNY (Score:4, Funny)
I hope you inadvertantly enter the door marked "Abuse" when searching for the Argument Clinic and never find your way out, you insensitive clod!
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It's A Shame.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's A Shame.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-profits can be abused. Many non-profit charities pay their CEO's millions in salary and bonuses. I seem to remember the CEO of United Way getting paid something $25 million a while back. Non-profits can pretty much do anything they want with their money. Large paychecks, bonuses, wasteful spending, whatever... Anyway, just being non-profit does not make it a bastion of integrity.
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Gentoo corporation news. (Score:5, Interesting)
From OS News, Posted on 2002-05-14 [osnews.com]:
Does Robbins own all of the stock in Gentoo Technologies, Inc.? If so, conversion to non-profit status may be easy (though having the IRS recognize it as non-profit for tax purposes may not.) If others own some of the stock, it conversion may prove problematic as they might have to agree. Otherwise, there might be a shareholders lawsuit for corporate waste (i.e., in this case, making a gift of corporate assets without compensation).
Why was Gentoo Technologies, Inc. initially set up as a for-profit company? It doesn't make sense. Since it was not a 501(c)(3) non-profit, donations to Gentoo Technologies, Inc. were not tax deductible. (Hell, it may have been the case that the donors were legally, albeit technically, responsible to pay gift tax on any donation over the annual limit.)
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Re:Gentoo corporation news. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know the particulars with Gentoo, but I was party to the creation of a not-for-profit last year and started a corporation some years ago. That experience leads me to believe expediancy may have been the reason. Establishing a corporation is just a matter of filling out some forms and sending them off to the state capital. Establishing a not-for-profit is a labor intensive and expensive process involving lots of lawyers and consultation with the IRS. For the not-for-profit we got pro-bono legal help, but even so it hardly seems worth it in retrospect.
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Re:Gentoo corporation news. (Score:3, Informative)
Just some quick answers to your questions (link references posted below):
1) Does Daniel Robbins own all of the stock in Gentoo Technologies?
A: I believe so. However, that company will no longer hold the intellectual property/copyrights for Gentoo (as it currently does). Those are being transferred to the new, NFP entity, The Gentoo Foundation: From the Gentoo site:
"In the proposal, Gentoo Foundation, Inc. will hold the intellectual property of the project..."
From Daniel:
"Gentoo Technologies, In
As a person who never used Gentoo (Score:3, Funny)
Bah what did he give us? (Score:4, Funny)
What?
A free distro?
Oh right, yeah. But beside that, what has he given us?
Technical support?
Oh yeah, that goes without saying...
Infrastructure?
Yeah, oh yeah it was much worse before...
Ok ok, beside a free distro, technical support and infrastructure what has he given us? That's right, nothing...
The copyrights to the distro?
Oh shut up you!
D Robbins (Score:5, Insightful)
I have learned more about how Linux works in the last year with Gentoo than I had in the previous 3 trying RH, Debian and Suse.
Re:D Robbins (Score:5, Insightful)
You aren't the only one. I really like the documents on the site. The installation handbook made it a breeze and setuping other apps was easy too from the documentation on their site.
Final words, thanks Daniel Robibs for providing us with a advanced distro that is easy to use.
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Re:D Robbins (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I learned a lot about my system when I installed Gentoo. My next step is probably going to be along the lines you suggested, but if I'd tried that bef
The future of Gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
For those of you concerned about this change, I remind you that Gentoo is one of the few remaining community-based Linux distributions. We are as successful as our community makes us. Thus, the best thing you can do to ensure the future success of Gentoo is to participate in its development, whether it be through testing ebuilds, writing documentation, fixing bugs on bugzilla or any one of the thousands of myriad tasks that make up Gentoo Linux.
I'm not sure what Daniel's plans are for the future, but I wish him the best in whatever he chooses to pursue.
Reason for resignation (Score:4, Funny)
After 4 years of compilation and rapid disk usage growth, the build was 98% complete when the hard drive became full and the the build failed. Daniel Robbins was then struck by a wave of despair and tendered his resignation. Last we heard of him, he was in a house for the mentally disabled, installing, formatting then reinstalling Mandrake and Debian on a 486 box over and over again, banging his head on the wall, munbling incomprehensible things about "precompiled" this or that...
An Etiquette question (Score:5, Funny)
Gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Its well enough. It goes to show that talent is something you cannot fake, not even with a committee. When I saw Gentoo three things really stood out for me,
1) It was a truely refreshing outlook on a distribution
2) It is source based
3) I was free from being unwitting pawn in the software binary release freedom debate
When I ran and got to know Gentoo I saw genius was at work, the light nimble free-floating kind of genius unencumbered by committee. Much of that was DRobbins shining through (as shown by his technical writings of frontier Linux applications for IBM.)
I will be sad to see him go, but to me it looked as if his inspiration was diluted by so many faces long ago. Don't get me wrong Gentoo is still my favorite and I run it exclusively at home. I think its gained much from Seemant and the others. But you just have to admire sometimes what individual talent can do on its own.
Re:Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)
Arrgh. Time to feed the trolls. Let me explain. After the install, you never actually wait for the packages to compile/install. You can use kde-3.2.0 while (should you feel the need to upgrade) you are compiling 3.2.2.
I've got you down as a friend, so you must have said something insightful in the past.
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Re:Gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
That's fine. I personally feel that its no fun being miserable. I therefore suggest that you not use it.
But for those of us who enjoy its flexibility, the ports system, and even like the idea of compiling from source (or using packages), then its a great distro.
Personally I use XFCE4 with gdm and XF86 on a 2.6.3 kernel. I have a great custom set of cursors, the fonts look great, and I'm happy.
Your experience may be different--that's fine.
I just don't see railing against a particular distro unless they are doing things that are "anti-linux", like refusing to release source or some such.
Gentoo is a great system. I don't like the installer (I would rather see an *option* for a graphical installer, but that view seems to be heavily opposed by the developers), but that is my only real complaint.
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Re:Gentoo (Score:3, Insightful)
> either. I may as well use yum, up2date, Red
> Carpet, YaST, urpmi, apt-get or any other binary
> package management system in the first place and
> be done with it.
So um... do it. If you don't like Gentoo then you are certainly free to do what you want. After all, doing what you want is what Gentoo is all about.
I don't know about you but... most of the time when I need a program for Linux (no matter which distribution), I usually end up download
Re:Gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)
That old hat is a refreshing outlook on a distribution? Surely you jest. Its a good outlook, don't get me wrong. But I don't know that I'd call it refreshing.
So? my apps will go 5% faster if I bother to wait 5000% more during the install?
You get some kick out of spending good money on hardware, and then running software on it that uses nothing more than what could have been done with a 386?
Its true that one will probably never recover the clock-cycles used to compile a distro with the spead that the optomization brings. But then again, just how many spare clock cycles does your computer have? Chances are even while typing your post into IE your computer is using only 2% of its clock cycles. Think of all the clock cycles you wasted while sleeping last night.
Those times you really need speed (games, heavy computation, etc...), it really pays for itself.
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Re:Gentoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite possibly. While the source based nature of the distro is often hearalded, the refreshing touches were things like; named (not numbered) runlevels, dependancies you can put directly in the init.d scripts, emerges way of letting you specify which configuration files get over-written during an update (not very great all the time), ramdisk for certain time-critical temporary files, etc...
i find the debian way of doing it is much more efficient... but then, the last distro i used was LFS... and it takes a hellova lotta time to maintain!!
A Debianite of good repute, came into #gentoo in the early days of its popularity and declared, "nice little distro, should mature into something good someday, but its pretty crappy now becuase it doesn't conform to the FHS." Drobbins (or one of the other top people) simply replied, "FHS compliance and good distro are not the same thing".
While o-o's complaints were shown to not really be FHS non-compliance I appreciated the moral I took away from that as do it the best way you can first then worry about comprimise afterward.
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Re:Gentoo (Score:3, Informative)
If you install a binary Apache, does it come with mod_foo? What if you wanted mod_foo? What if you didn't? The binary is going to be built one way or the other, and if your preferences aren't the same as the distribution maintainer's, then you're not a happy camper.
It's not just about CCFL
If you love something truly, let it go! (Score:5, Insightful)
cant emerge a chief architect (Score:5, Funny)
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no masked or unmasked ebuilds to satisfy "chief_architect".
!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.
linucks root #
Re:cant emerge a chief architect (Score:4, Funny)
root# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 USE="chief_architect" emerge 'sys-distro/gentoo'
Here are the packages that I would emerge, in order:
[ebuild R ] sys-distro/gentoo-linux-20040426 0 kB
Total size of downloads: 0 kB
root# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 emerge -pl 'sys-distro/gentoo-linux'
Here are the packages that I would emerge, in order:
[ebuild R ] sys-distro/gentoo-linux-20040426
*gentoo-linux-20040426
26 Apr 2004; Daniel Robbins gentoo-linux-20040426.ebuild:
dreadfully sorry
chief_architect USE flag removed
so long, suckers
root#
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Gentoo Copyrights (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
Copyright Assignment to Gentoo [gentoo.org]
Gentoo Technologies Inc. Copyright Assignment Form [gentoo.org]
Gentoo Documentation Issues [gentoo.org]
Purely Personal (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a snippit:
Re:Purely Personal (Score:5, Insightful)
He can put down on his resume that he created one of the top 10 most popular Linux distros, and that he supervised quite a few interesting technical innovations unique to that distro.
This experience would help qualify for a job with a salary quite a bit more than $20,000 (not to mention more influence and responsibility) over that of a random code monkey.
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From the weekly newsletter (Score:4, Informative)
"While Daniel Robbins is busy converting Gentoo into a not-for-profit
organisation on his side of the Atlantic, the German Gentoo developers
have finalised all the necessary steps for registering an almost identical
legal entity, called "eingetragener Verein" (registered association) under
the German law. It'll take the commercial courts another four to six weeks
to acknowledge the setup, but the association[11] is already operational,
has opened a bank account, and started raking in bushels of money via
their new online shop[12], whose main advantage over the Gentoo store[13]
in the US lies in its comparatively low-cost deliveries to customers in
Germany."
In Some Ways Linux is Still in its Infancy (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand the dilemma of a new family and a lot of debt. Been there, done that. But I think we're just on the cusp of something grand. I hope Daniel doesn't get so far out that he can't come back and reap some of the rewards when this thing pays off. I know it will! Gentoo and Linux are just too great to write off. And I hope that once a lot of the bottom feeders (myself included) making a living off X free distro, start taking responsibility, and budget R&D funds, maybe then we'll see some joy. We at least are looking ahead to make it part of our budget, a percentage of each sale.
Good luck, Daniel, hang in there.
And the executives of Red Hat are rich... (Score:5, Interesting)
The story of Daniel Robbins and Gentoo Linux seems to me to be an example of software as art and Daniel as a starving artist. And yes, I realize that many other people were involved in the Gentoo project. But one of the leading forces behind Gentoo seems to be leaving because he can't afford to take part in the project anymore.
The world does not owe artists, writers or software engineers working on open source/ Free Software a living. But what is interesting to me is that if, for the sake of argument, some commercial entity, like Red Hat, were to come along and start selling Gentoo at some point in the future, Daniel Robbins and the rest of the Gentoo developers would get as much as the Linux developers got from Red Hat going public (e.g., very little).
If software engineering jobs were not moving overseas and our income was not under constant downward pressure this might not be such a big deal. There is a lot to be said for doing something you love. For many people money can't replace this. But when it gets to the point where you can't pay your bills or are unemplyed, survival becomes the important issue.
Speaking for myself, the current state of our industry throws into question any open source project that can be picked up by slick marketeers and resold to end users. Since I'm not independently wealthy, why should I work for free? I have to wonder if Daniel Robbins is not asking himself similar questions as he looks at the state of his finances.
For more on this see my essay Freedom Can be Slavery [bearcave.com]
If Any Of You Have The Gaul.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can take your personal criticisms of Dan and politely ram them up your ass.
Let me make something clear here. I don't know Dan. Never met him, never talked with him. What I do know, however, is that he fits a mold i've seen over and over again in the past 10 years. There's a certain spirit of selflessness and altruism that underpins pretty much everything "major" going on in the Linux community. People like Dan give hours upon hours of their time, building, creating, fixing, and helping people they can't even see, and know they will never meet. They do it because it's fun, and they do it because it makes them feel good to know they're helping someone else. That's all there is to it.
Just incase you weren't in school the day they taught this, here's basically how it works: Criticizing the character or works of someone who shows charity, thoughtfulness, and selflessness makes you a royal fucking asshole. Infact, ANY form of criticism of people like Dan aught to be promptly rejected, returned, then rammed tightly up the ass of it's issuer.
You, the beneficiary of the hard work of people like Daniel Robbins and the Gentoo development community, have absolutely no right to complain, question, or laugh at any decision he happens to make in regard to his own life. Looking back at the Linux community landscape over the past 5 years, we can see what happened to people who continually gave blindly, and asked for essentially nothing in return. Dan's decision to pull back from the front lines is one of the smartest moves he could possibly make at this point of the game. Criticisms about software are one thing. Commentary on someone's financial status are something entirely different, and something you have no fucking right to criticize..Especially from someone who did nothing but give you shit for free.
And even if that weren't the case here....that he's turning the reins over for a totally different reason...WTF have you done that gives you the right to criticize him, or anyone who in his position?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Re:If Any Of You Have The Gaul.. (Score:4, Funny)
Which one - Asterix? Obelix? Vitalstatistix? Or just some random Frenchman?
Please, if anyone has the Gaul, return him to Bowie J. Poag. He can't sleep without him.
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$20,000 in debt (Score:3, Interesting)
How 'bout some support? Visit the Gentoo homepage [gentoo.org] and click the donation button in the upper left corner.
The man's got to feed his family after all.
Re:$20,000 in debt (Score:3, Informative)
A different spin (Score:4, Informative)
While he certainly was the driving force behind Gentoo, it wasn't all good.
To put it bluntly, Mr. Robbins is an utter PITA to work with. Many of the same things that have been said about Theo de Raadt (true or not) could be said about drobbins. This has alread caused a fork [zynot.org] in Gentoo. My very limited exposure to dealing with Mr. Robbins left me with such a bad taste in my mouth I just decided to drop it rather than put up with it.
Gentoo is a wonderful distribution, which I still use. But like several other open source projects (*cough*xfree86*cough*thebsds*cough*), those running the project were operating disconnected from their user/developer base. It isn't that central control is bad (Linus keeps control of final say) but that a central control that doesn't play nice with others is going to spell trouble.
I hope that Gentoo will end up better for it.
Re:A different spin (Score:4, Insightful)
IMO, Theo's biggest failure is in NOT disconnecting himself with the day to day details. I don't know if it explains his attitude, but it certainly may contribute to it.
IFO suspect that Daniel is leaving the project because it's become such a burden to him that he no longer can spend any time doing anything else. Now, if he'd quit during the early days, a couple years ago, yeah, I'd have a beef with that. But he stuck it out, and now he's turning it over to other people whom he trusts so he can go on to things that are just as important (or maybe more so) to him.
Perhaps he's a PITA to deal with, for you, because you don't realize that he's overloaded. I'm not in his position, but I am in one that is similar (if perpendicular) and I can understand quite well why he's done this.
No offense, but there's a limit to how much one can take before you want to say "fuck this, there's other things I want to do". I reached my limit in that respect several times in the last 18 years in various jobs. Can you say the same?
I'm older than Daniel, I don't have a family, but I've been in that situation enough that I understand why he's doing this. The lesson that Theo hasn't learned is that when you start burning out you should walk away and hand the reins to people you trust, rather than sticking it out and pissing people off.
Sorry for the rant, and maybe I'm wrong but
SB
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Re:Offer from MS? (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as Linux is near and dear to Robbins' heart (and our own), it just doesn't pay like an industry job does, much less what a major player like Microsoft or IBM or Apple could pay.
We'd all like to be doing what we love to do, but sometimes we learn to grow by doing what makes us more money and ultimately more leisure time to spend with friends and family.
Re:Offer from BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Participation in the dog-eat-dog struggle is almost entirely unnecessary for most people. The poverty level in Western countries exceeds the upper middle class of most other countries.
One could, if one were willing to give up one's lifestyle, live cheaply and have leisure time for friends and family in abundance. A trailer home in Kentucky can be had for $1000, and a diet of ground beef, flour, spices and vegetables can sustain a family for less than $5000 a year.
You are not working for leisure time, don't kid yourself. Almost any working American today could retire and move to a 3rd world country and live comfortably forever. You are working for DSL, the new Radeon, that huge TV, the laptop, your spiffy car, fancy dinners, nice clothes and every other element required to 'keep up with the Joneses'. You find those things more valuable than pursuit of what you love, if you are not doing what you love.
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Re:Offer from BS (Score:5, Funny)
Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
2. ???
3. Profit!!!!
I think that it goes more like this;
1. Resign from overseeing a linux distibution that requires long hours and thankless mind-numbing work.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!!
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Re:Gentoo's future (Score:5, Insightful)
Thought yeah some central authority to guide the project is required asap to keep the momentum.
Tom
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Re:Gentoo's future (Score:4, Insightful)
More likely...
1) Leader resigns
2) Developers don't agree on future features, etc.
3) Of dozen forks most never launch but 2-3 really shine (perhaps think
- (a) knoppix/gentoo
- (b) a gentoo focused on binary distros
- (c) a gentoo focused on source hacking
)
4) One of those guys leaves, leaving room for newer and cooler forks.
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Re:Has any reason been given? (Score:5, Informative)
looks like it may well be part of the reason;
specifically, he cannnot (and should not) have to shoulder the financial risk necessary to shift gentoo to its full Not For Profit status.
Given that he has a young family to support, I for one can sympathise with his position.
There's going to be an official announcement once the dust settles slightly, but this [gentoo.org]appears to be the live gentoo forum thread.
Go easy on it, the forums are pretty heavily loaded at the best of times, and the last thing the place needs is a full blown slashdotting!
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Re:Common response to "You should use Linux!" (Score:4, Insightful)
I see the desire to give users choice leading to fragmentation. This is quite different from seeing one or the other.
The Macintosh platform is my preferred choice. However, this has nothing to do with configurability, and everything to do with ease-of-use. In fact, I take exception to Apple forcing me to use the Aqua interface. Sure, it's pretty to look at, but there are certain aspects about it that drive me nuts. The Dock sucks. Menulettes suck. Why they couldn't just stick the OS 7/8/9 Platinum interface on Unix, like they did with AUX, I'll never know. And there are asects that are inconsistent within the interface itself. It definately needs more work. But if I go sit down at any other Mac with OS X, I'll know how to find my way around and get work done. The same can't necessarily be said of the different Linux desktop environments.
I agree. But will someone who just got up from the Xandros desktop be able to sit down at a Linspire desktop and be just as productive? This is what I think should be the goal; unity for the masses, with choice available for those who desire it.
Thanks for the response. It's nice to get a reasoned response to such a hot-button topic.
(tig)
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Re:What is there to copyright? (Score:5, Informative)
That said, other non-GPL'd stuff regarding Gentoo might also be copyrighted. Like original documentation or scripts, configuration program, help files, etc..
W
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