Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems

[Albert Hopkins]

[Oh no! How did I let myself get sucked into a gentoo-dev thread? ;-)]

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 13:31 -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

[...]
> I'll just throw out a couple of my own comments:
>
[ I'm skipping the first one because it doesn't interest me]

[Comment about Gentoo's non-participation in LSB]

While I somewhat agree, I think Gentoo's main selling point (at least
for me) is that is the way it stands out from your typical Linux distro.
It's source-based package system was once what distinguished it from the
rest.  In summary, I don't think Gentoo should totally adapt to what
"the rest" are going any more than I think Slackware or GoboLinux
should.  What I do see is that perhaps there are ideas that Gentoo has
that maybe other distros could benefit from, and vice versa.  But
sometimes we have to agree to disagree with "mainstream".

As for "enterprise"... that's fine.  Gentoo has traditionally been the
kind of distro that throws you just enough rope to hang oneself, so I
never really considered it an "enterprise" Linux, but if that is the
direction that it wants to head in then it benefit it to make it more
known to the general public.

[Stuff about distrowatch, other distros and "market" share...]

>  Gentoo "share of mind" is dropping and dropping rapidly, although I don't think
> it's because of misbehavior in the community. I think it's because:
>
> a. Daniel Robbins left and went to Microsoft, leaving no "Mr. Gentoo", and

I would generalize this more.  I would say that "Mr. Gentoo"
isn't/wasn't Daniel Robbins but Larry, and in recent times Larry has not
enlightened us with his vision of Gentoo and where it's going.  We have
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml but where do we go from there?
Maybe we need to have a sit down with Larry so we can know what Gentoo
really is.

> b. No effort to seek corporate support, at least none that I'm aware of.

I would also like to generalize this more.  Instead of "corporate
support" I would say funding, whether it's corporate or what.  I think
it's important to convince people that they should give us money, and we
should have the wisdom and capability of receiving said money and doing
something productive with it.

> In short, I'm not sure there is any future for *any* "pure community
> distro". Somehow Gentoo needs to at least find a marketable defendable
> niche and some kind of corporate sponsorship. Maybe embedded will turn
> out to be that niche -- I'd love to have even 1/4 of Portage on
> something like a Zaurus or "iPhone".

It's NFP, but even NFP has to have some sort of structure and unified
vision.  Even my neighborhood coop has decent solidarity and a marketing
strategy.

--
Albert W. Hopkins

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