RE: Fw: [gentoo-dev] where goes Gentoo?

[Matthew Marlowe]

>> There have been some really interesting points brought up recently
>> about "where is Gentoo going?"  I have been wondering that myself.

I really appreciate that you had the initiative to start this conversation.
I also agree that its a lingering problem that needs to be addressed
clearly.

>> Some people seem to think that Gentoo has the potential to be an
>> enterprise player.  I have not responded directly to those people, but
>> I wonder if they know what they mean.  I have worked in the enterprise
>> UNIX market for 6 years.  My code is running in places like NASA
>> mission control, 9-1-1 call centers, and most of the telephone
>> carriers.  I've produced patches on weekends to close $800m deals.
>> I now work in hp's Open Source and Linux Organization, mostly on RHEL
>> and SLES, so I have a good idea of what it takes to be an enterprise
>> player.
>>

I worked on NASA projects for several years and helped write the code
to support a major scientific instrument onboard one research satellite(XTE), 
as well as contributing key sections of the health and safety, mission monitoring,
and command generation subsystems associated with the science operating
center for that satellite.   I've also managed the infrastructure for several
web hosting companies, even created my own startup which provided
high-end systems administration services for DotComs which couldn't afford
to ever go down.

I am also a supporter of getting Gentoo into the enterprise.

>> In my humble opinion, Gentoo is missing too many points to be an
>> enterprise Linux.  We commit to a live tree.  We don't have true QA,
>> testing or tinderbox.  We don't have paid staff, alpha/beta/rc cycles.
>> We don't really have product lifecycles, since we don't generally
>> backport fixes to older versions, requiring instead for people to
>> update to a more recent release.  We don't have, and probably will
>> never be able to offer, support contracts.  We support as wide a range
>> of hardware as the upstream kernel, plus hardware that requires
>> external drivers; we don't have access to a great deal of the hardware
>> for which we provide drivers.  We understand when real life gets in
>> the way of bug-fixing, because all our developers are volunteers.
>>

On the other hand, many of the other commercial distributions have their
own problems.   Redhat can generally be an expensive distribution
to maintain in a server environment where applications are constantly
changing and newer versions of open source applications are required
to address performance or feature requirements.  RPM hell still
exists.  I haven't played around with SUSE, but I wouldn't expect them 
to be any different.

Furthermore, the cost of deploying commercial licenses can be
cost prohibitive for small businesses with less than 25 servers
who have an annual IT budget of $50K-$500K.  These businesses
still deserve a solidly reliable OS that is customized for them, but
their budget needs to be allocated towards colocation facilities,
bandwidth, and professional system administrators - not expensive
software licenses and maintenance constracts.

And, no, CentOS or Fedora are not an option for them currently.
Fedora changes everything every six months or so, and support 
for old installs is questionable.  Gentoo beats CentOS out of
the water in terms of customizeability, community, and overall
package availability.   Plus RHEL, which CentOS is based on,
has its own problems  (setting up a simple server with it yesterday
and having bonding enabled caused a kernel crash). 

A clueful sysadmin with gentoo is a far superior arrangement 
provided the rate of hardware installs isn't too much. For very large
environments with 100+ boxes, I'd definitly agree with you that
gentoo has a long way to go.

Regarding your points on gentoo's weaknesses:
Live Tree - not really a problem, thats what snapshots are for.
QA Testing - not reallly a problem, thats what snapshots and a test server
is for.
Backporting of patches - A real concern, but I believe that gentoo is
such a good solution that eventually some startup biz will address it.
Support contracts - I'll take professional sysadmins over contracts
any day, but this can also eventually be addressed by an eventual
startup biz dedicated to it.  I'd pay $10/month per box for it and could
instantly refer 50-100 boxes assuming the solution was properly implemented
and I could convince my clients to go with it.


>> I think that attempting to take Gentoo in the "enterprise" direction
>> is a mistake.  I think that we are a hobbyist distribution.  This
>> doesn't mean that we should not strive to meet some of the enterprise
>> goals.  Those things can be important to hobbyists too.  But I don't
>> think we should be aiming for corporate America.
>>

I think Gentoo shouldn't rule out providing some support and flexibility
for any need that a significant amount of its userbase is interested in.
And, I know there are a significant number of devs already who
have at least some interest in enterprise support do to conversations
I've had via IRC.

I definitly don't expect that the entire gentoo community or dev base
should go substantially out of their way or change organizational structure
to facilitate enterprise capabilities.  Just allow some startup biz that 
eventually comes along to be able to provide a backported snapshot
based tree for their own customers.

>> I don't even understand why that goal appeals to people.  Let other
>> distros go there!  I want Gentoo to run in people's homes, in student
>> dorm rooms, etc.  Places where people want a fun distribution that
>> they can tailor and work on easily.
>>

Other distros suck in different ways.  Gentoo definitly has enterprise
advantages.

>> I like the idea of Gentoo on alternative arches and in embedded
>> environments.  Not because I want Sony to start using Gentoo on
>> walkmans, but purely because the idea of running Linux on a PDA is
>> cool.  I'd like Gentoo to be a place where neat things are developed.
>> If RH or SuSE (or another for-profit Linux vendor) wants to take some
>> of those developments and use them to make a profit, that's fine with
>> me.  We're over here having fun.
>>


RH has burned alot of people's trust.  Some devs probably want nothing
to do with them.

>> Also I find it amusing when people say that Gentoo exists for the
>> users.  I think that is wrong.  Gentoo exists for the *developers*.
>> It's our playground, and it's the reason we use a live tree rather
>> than switching to an actually sane approach.  The users are cool
>> because they point out bugs, help solve problems on bugzilla, suggest
>> enhancements, provide patches, and notify us of package updates.
>> Sometimes they become developers.  But the truth is that Gentoo sees
>> improvement and maintenance in the areas that appeal to the
>> developers.  And that is why Gentoo exists for the developers first,
>> the users second.
>>

Thats part of the reason that I'm a developer - because I like interacting
with the dev community here.  But, the users have their own role and 
the above could be taken the wrong way.

>> Regards,
>> Aron

MattM

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