Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo Healthy? (The Return)

[Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas]

On Tuesday 03 July 2007 09:07:24 Grant wrote:
> In December 2006 I started a thread titled "Is Gentoo Healthy?" in
> which I was roundly put down for raising the possibility that the
> decline in the number of Gentoo users could possibly affect the
> remaining Gentoo users in a negative way.
>
> Is everyone still toeing that line?  The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter
> hasn't been published in almost two months.  Is Gentoo destined to be
> just another distro starved for contributors and struggling to stay up
> to date?  If so, I really misjudged it.  The meta approach of Gentoo
> is superior to any other in my mind, and I think it's growth and
> potential are being stunted by the "we don't need them" attitude which
> perpetuates Gentoo's lack of usability features for beginners.
>
> Gentoo needs as many users as possible to reach its potential.  It's a
> short-sighted mistake to think that non-contributing users do Gentoo
> no good.  Non-contributing users become contributors as time passes.
> Car mechanics all start as car drivers.
>
> - Grant

  Personally I love Gentoo, IMHO the compile aspect of it ( the part that I 
love most of all ) is what keeps beginners and novice GNU/Linux users away, 
the target audience will always be those who don't mind taking the time to 
build a fully customized system even if it takes a day or two.

  Gentoo does indeed need more users to become contributors, I have been 
a "Non-contributing" user for some time now, just promoting it when ever 
possible, I even got my company to switch many Windows workstations to Gentoo 
development stations, a few months ago my company offered to pay me to work 
full time on any free and open source project that might benifit them in the 
end, I jumped at the chance and applied to work in different areas of Gentoo 
(mostly C/CPP and Perl development areas), after many unanswered e-mails and 
one telling me to "be patient" I gave up and applied to work in the KDE 
project ( in two days I had my own SVN and started porting code to KDE4 ), I 
personally think Gentoo makes it hard to contribute in many areas, this might 
be why few Non-contributing users become contributing users.

-- 
Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas
# Free & Open Source Software Advocate
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