[gentoo-dev] Re: Portage QOS

[Duncan]

Chris Reffett posted on Thu, 09 Jan 2014 16:08:39 -0500 as excerpted:

>> To keep in power it's in your deepest interest to close the open gates
>> that invite competition while the power is in your hands.

>> PortageQOS is small step, it's not everything or main part of the
>> system, it's a just small contribution. But it will close the door and
>> you'll have another peaceful 8 years to rule.
>>
> Right here is the big problem: you're not looking at this from the
> perspective of the average Gentoo developer. We don't care about market
> share. We don't care whether we're on top for another few years. There
> are several forks of Gentoo. I doubt most devs care about them.

Agreed with Chris.

@ Igor:

Closed... open.  You clearly don't seem to get it.

There's a reason it's called "open source", contrasting favorably with 
"closed source".  You're seriously pushing deliberately closing the door 
on people's choice?  That's typical closed-source methology, and what 
many FLOSS folks would consider the antithesis of the entire reason they 
do what they do.  And that's your sales point, to a community-based open-
source-based distro, not to some closed source company like MS?

If Gentoo dies, well, rest in peace, Gentoo, it was good while it lasted, 
but people moved on to something that suited their needs better.

That's the whole point.  If people are more comfortable with a binary 
distro, there's lots of them available, and many gentoo users and devs 
are even happy to take some time to listen to what a user needs and make 
the best recommendation they can about a distro that fits that need.  If 
people want a distro that's near as expert level and with near the choice 
of gentoo, but don't want to /always/ have to build /everything/ from 
source, Arch Linux is over that way, or if you want to stick with the 
general gentoo idea but want a few tweaks, Funtoo's over that way, and 
Sabayon is over there.  And if they want to go full-out and build 
/everything/ from source without gentoo's automated framework, well, 
Linux from Scratch is right over yonder too!

The thing is, we don't see this as a game where if those distros win, we 
lose, or if we win, they lose.  Instead, we're different players on the 
same team, and if we can helpfully direct users their way that are more 
comfortable with them than with us, great, and we'll hope they'll do the 
same with people who might be more comfortable here, too, but we're not 
making that a condition of our directing people we know will be more 
comfortable there to them.

Similarly, we're on the same team when it comes to patches.  No distro or 
their developers/maintainers want the *FULL* burden of supporting all 
those packages, and if Gentoo devs can find a Fedora or Debian patch that 
solves a problem we too have, or if we came up with a patch first that 
solves a problem they're having too, great, have at it!

And in all that, if Gentoo's former devs and users all end up on Arch or 
LFS instead, as I said, rest in peace, Gentoo, it was good having known 
you, but your time appears to have been up, and others took your place.

But you're talking deliberately closing doors and walling in users so 
they don't switch, instead of happily pointing them at distros they'd 
obviously be more comfortable with.  WTF is that sort of attitude doing 
here in free/libre and open source in the first place?  That's more the 
walled garden Apple or MS approach, not FLOSS.

Meanwhile, you might try googling Zynot.  That was one early, perhaps the 
first, Gentoo fork.  Such talk of cutthroat competition in a zero-sum 
game, of deliberately cutting off user options so they'd be forced to 
stick with you, of it can be us or them, not both, etc, was exactly the 
sort of thing they tried.  That was 2002/2003 or so.  While the events 
and acrimony surrounding that did ultimately drive Gentoo's founder 
(Daniel Robbins) elsewhere, Gentoo survived (thanks in part to drobbins' 
efforts to secure a good future for it even at heavy personal cost to 
himself and his family as he was already in the process of leaving).  
Gentoo's still here, but where is zynot today?

I remember back in early 2004 as I was researching my switch to gentoo, 
reading up on zynot, which was at that time still a going concern, and 
repeatedly asking myself as I read the essays from zynot's founder 
heavily criticizing gentoo and its founder, why can't he see what's 
happening, that every single thing he's negatively pointing at in gentoo 
and drobbins he and zynot are doing themselves in far greater measure, 
and why he was so stuck on closed source competitive techniques in an 
open source world.  His very essays, supposedly criticizing gentoo, 
instead ended up convincing me more than ever that gentoo was /exactly/ 
the right choice for me. =:^)

And... gentoo's still here, but where is zynot, today?  I think I made 
the right choice then, and I'm still convinced it was then and remains 
now, the right choice, for me, today. =:^)

But if gentoo dies as a result of following those policies, well, it 
dies, and I, and other gentoo users and devs, will find something else to 
replace it.  But gentoo didn't die when zynot was saying those things 
(ultimately, zynot did), and pardon me for saying so, but I don't see it 
dieing now, when you're saying them.  Instead, the risk of death is if we 
belief and follow them now, just as it was then.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman