[gentoo-nfp] Foundation roles and Daniel's track record

[Daniel Drake]

There are enough misunderstandings/uninformed statements being made here
for me to want to weigh in with my own clarifications. Most of this has 
been said already, mixed in with other threads, but I feel some points 
deserve specific visibility.

I'll briefly put my 2 points at the top here for those who don't want to
read this whole email. If this comes as a surprise, shock, or you just
want to see the full justifications for whatever reason then you might 
want to read the whole thing.

1. Daniel Robbins' offer to return to the foundation is much more than
that. Not only does he want to return to the highest position there is,
he proposes that we redefine the foundation to do several things it was
explicitly designed (by himself) NOT to do, and hence restructuring much
of the developer community metastructure too.

2. In my (informed) opinion, Daniel being in a position of power within 
Gentoo was a BAD thing for a long period of time towards the end of his 
stay. Daniel's actions (or lack of them) were harming the distribution 
and the community as a whole. Daniel's personal company (which no other 
developers had any real involvement in) built around the distribution 
was failing, harming the distribution, and nobody could really do 
anything about it.
(this is based on PERSONAL RECOLLECTION of the time when Daniel was
leading Gentoo. I don't think many of the developers here today were
actually developers when this was the case - but I was, so I believe I
have half a leg to stand on).

And now for the personal justifications: (corrections welcome, assuming 
you actually were around to know what happened)

--------------------------------------------

The Gentoo Foundation was formed by Daniel Robbins himself. I
guess some people knew this and some didn't. It was formed when Daniel
wanted to leave Gentoo (more on this below), but as he had certain legal
rights like a trademark (?), copyright assignment from most developers,
etc, the legal entities needed a new home (he couldn't just leave
without causing us a lot of problems). Also, he had previously been 
running Gentoo through a homegrown for-profit company, I think as a sole 
trader (rather than a ltd company), called "Gentoo Technologies, Inc.".

Daniel formed the foundation solely for the legal stuff (in
order that Gentoo Technologies could dissolve) and he explicitly
restricted its purpose to that alone. No influence on project direction
or development.

This has always been a bit of a misconception outside of the development
community - various people have attributed prior foundation issues or
election results to have a big influence on Gentoo development. Or
blaming conceived problems with Gentoo communities on the foundation
trustees not doing their jobs, etc. There was even concern at one point
that developers (foundation members) were voting for foundation trustees
based on their technical ability.

Daniel's offer to take over the Gentoo Foundation is not simply an offer
to pick things up where they are. There are big changes involved here.
Note that he lists 5 changes at
http://blog.funtoo.org/2008/01/here-my-offer.html and all of them except
number 4 are rather significant.

Chris G said this rather nicely in another post too. Chris suggests that
his proposal involves disbanding the Gentoo Council (the true managerial
backbone of the distribution). While there may be options other than
tearing down the Council, you can get a feel for just how major these
proposed changes are.

Further confusion is encouraged by Daniel's more recent posts:

> Also, if what Grant said is correct - [...]
> then it will be very hard to fix the user/developer
> disconnect in the Gentoo community via the Foundation as it currently
> exists.

Why will it be very hard to fix that problem via the Foundation? Because
the foundation as it was designed and as it currently stands was given a
completely different set of roles!

In order to fix that problem, a much more sensible approach would be to
go through the 2 Gentoo projects with the explicit role of addressing
such issues. Those would be User Relations and Public Relations.
I'm not sure what draws Daniel to think those issues would be better
handled by the Foundation, and if he's really keen on solving the issues
why he hasn't publicly demonstrated any interest in communicating with
the people within those projects, but would be interested to hear more.

So, it's not just a case of considering Daniel as a foundation
candidate, it's a case of considering of a large rework of the community
structure. Maybe that's a good thing, but it does need a lot of
thought/details/planning, and it's unrealistic to expect a quick
response here. (if I were making such proposals, I personally would work
incrementally: join the foundation first, THEN become it's leader, THEN
redefine everything)

To summarise my point: Daniel created the foundation to specifically
be isolated from everything except legal aspects, and this is exactly
what has happened since its inception. Not only does his offer include
taking over the foundation, it involves largely redefining the
foundation *and* much of the rest of the metastructure.

-------------------

Now for the second thing bugging me: certain people's unquestioned trust
in Daniel Robbins. Is it a "he founded the distribution so he must be a
great candidate" type thing? I guess that is a reasonable assumption to
make. It's also a nice thought of the founder returning and all.

But that said, how many users actually have good knowledge and
experience of the state of affairs when Daniel was in power,
particularly at the time when he was working his way out the door? I
suspect very few do. When I was a user, I had no inkling of any problems 
or directions with Gentoo management. When I was a 
developer-in-training, I had only a little knowledge that Daniel was 
causing problems and fortunately was creating an exit path for himself. 
The first day I became a developer and had access to the private 
resources, BOOM!, the sorry state of the distribution immediately 
slammed right into my face, much of which I was previously completely 
unaware of.

How many present-day Gentoo developers have knowledge + experience of
the state of affairs when Daniel was in power? Probably more than I can
count on my fingers, thumbs, and toes, but not significantly more.
Daniel's departure happened years ago, and as is typical in open source
communities, people's interests change so developers come and go quite
rapidly - we're left with a relatively small number of present-day
developers who actually had developer status when Daniel was in charge.

Admittedly I was late onto the scene, and was only a developer for a 
fairly short time period while Daniel was around, but the events that 
happened during that time were enough to see that problems had been 
going on for a while.

If any other developers from that "era" would like to weigh in and 
clarify/correct/disagree with any of the below, feel free - I know that 
there are others around who have more of a picture than I do.

At this time, there were some hefty conflicts going on, many people were 
upset that they had so little influence on the direction of Gentoo, not 
entirely following what Daniel Robbins should propose their projects 
should do, etc. Things had reached the point where the whole project was 
being affected by the mess (in contrast to here where the Foundation 
'problems' are *only* affecting legal stuff).

It was widely agreed that having just a single person leading the 
distribution was a big bottleneck and was hindering the progression of 
the distro. Not only that, Daniel seemed to be a bad fit for that kind 
of managerial role anyway.

A common complaint was that Daniel kept starting projects and making 
movements and then not following through. I witnessed this first hand 
where after admitting a huge backlog of issues that only he could work 
on, he went on to propose that Gentoo Technologies spin off another 
company, a co-operative to provide services around Gentoo or something 
like that.

The impression people had is that Daniel is a developer (technical type 
person), but Gentoo had grown to the point where as the top of the 
chain, he had to spend all of his time on the non-technical day-to-day 
stuff which was not his thing, and things suffered as a result.

I know this sounds a bit negative against Daniel, and I'm not saying 
that I could do any better either, but I'm with the idea that Daniel is 
a talented software developer and has proven himself to be good at 
thinking up ideals for the basis of an entire OS, but he is (or at 
least, was) not good enough on the managerial side of things. I should 
also mention that some of his managerial-style work was assisted by a 
personal attorney of his.

Let's not also forget that after Gentoo had "tensed up" so much that 
even he realised the best thing he could do is leave, he disbanded 
Gentoo Technologies declaring $10,000 of personal debt. The company failed.

Summary #2: based on my recollection of the events that happened while I 
was a developer and Daniel was in charge, I personally feel Daniel was a 
bad fit for the "distribution leader" position and that his skills in 
the non-technical domains were lacking.

And my personal opinion: I do not know him very well, but despite the 
above I still respect him very much as a developer and as a founder. I 
do not support the idea of him returning in a position of power, but I 
do acknowledge that in the past few years he may have become a better 
manager type person; I will happily give him my vote for a trustee 
position for another chance, and welcome him back to the developer 
community.

Daniel
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