Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 14:22 +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:51:39AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > This is what I don't get.  So what if Gentoo is an amoeba?  Does it
> > really matter?  Would you rather that we dropped Gentoo/ALT, Hardened,
> > Embedded, and anything else interesting just so we can focus on a "core
> > technology" of some sort?  Remember that we are not out to make money.
> > We are a not-for-profit for a reason.  We don't have to answer to
> > investors and shareholders.
>
> Gentoo will cease to be relevant if we continue as-is.  Maybe not tomorrow
> or next month, but within a couple of years, we'll be Just Another
> Slackware.  Personally, I don't want that.  If other folks do, then that's
> OK.

What makes you think this?  What empirical evidence do you have that
proves that Gentoo is dying?  All I see is more and more people using
Gentoo for more and more things.  Sure, Gentoo is no longer the talk of
the town that it used to be, but that's going to happen with any
distribution as it comes to age.  It gets replaced in the news by the
new kid on the block that is the flavor of the week.  Then again, I
don't see what's wrong with Slackware, so perhaps I simply can't follow
your train of thought.

> > I welcome you to fork Gentoo to do this.  I'll be glad to assist you in
> > any way that I can without giving up my ideas for where I want to take
> > my projects within Gentoo.  I respect that you should do the same,
> > rather than hijack the distribution as a whole for your own purposes.
>
> "my own purposes" are simply that Gentoo remains relevant.  I think it has
> some great ideas and a great core technology.  I'd hate to see for all that
> to be relegated to some hobbyist distro that people tinker around on but
> nobody takes seriously.

Who doesn't take us seriously?  For that matter, who does?  You want to
be taken seriously?  Spend money on marketing Gentoo.

The only real issue I see with Gentoo's market penetration is that we
don't have the mind share necessary to continue to grow at the pace that
we once did.  This is due to not only our reaching a certain critical
mass, but also because of relative newcomers such as Ubuntu that will
always pull a certain group of people.  Once the next new hotness comes
out, those same people will jump the Ubuntu ship to whatever that new
flavor of the week happens to be.  This is a pretty constant and
continual cycle within Linux.  Again, I see you focusing solely on the
Linux aspect of Gentoo.

So what is Gentoo to you?  Portage?  Gentoo Linux?

> Maybe you have a different vision for Gentoo.  If so, I respect that, but
> please don't accuse me of trying to hijack anything.  I expressed an
> opinion and you took my words and twisted them against me.  This is a
> perfect example of why Gentoo's never going to go anywhere.  We fight too
> much amongst ourselves.

Really, I don't have any vision for Gentoo and I like it that way.  I
work to improve Gentoo.  If that ends in Gentoo becoming the premiere
distribution for the enterprise, or simply the best distribution for
basing your own distribution from, I don't care.  I work on Gentoo
because I enjoy it, not because I ever expected it to "go anywhere" at
all.  Yes, I twisted your words against you.  I'll freely admit it.  Why
did I do it?  I did it simply to prove a point.  I am attempting to show
that what you are proposing is not very well thought out and really
reads to many people, not just myself, as "You should play ball my way,
or get off the court."  Whether that was what you intended or not, that
is how it reads at least to me.  I can now see that your intentions are
not quite what you originally implied, so I do apologise for it only
insofar as where I have misrepresented you, but my statements still
stand in all other regards.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux