[Sussex] Gentoo forked...

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff

On 26 June 2003 at 16:48 Geoff Teale wrote:
> Gentoo on the whole, like Debian, utilises it's community to deliver 
> more value than the likes of Red Hat.  Red Hat are very good 
> at things like documentation and support (on a commercial basis) but 
> they cannot match Gentoo or Debian's packaging system because people 
> won't commit to do that kind of work for someone else's commercial
> benefit and Red Hat couldn't afford the level of staffing required to
> do it privately. 

Geoff this is a good point.  A commercial operations, be it RH, IBM or
M$ for that matter, have a limited set of resources and a know set of 
commitments.  For example, they have to produce documentation because
that is want is expected from the client base.  If someone comes up with
a really cool idea unless that idea marketable then it isn't likely to be
pursued.  A commercial organisation has to restrict it's activities to
those generate revenue.

But for open source projects (OSs, apps or distros) revenue is not an issue.
Most are in the project "just for [the] fun" of it!  The most costly and
limited resource for a company (developers) are free (and in some cases
plentiful).  If some inside the group (or outside for that matter) comes
up with a really cool idea then the response is normally - great, go
for it.  As such the project can expand in all directions that the member
are interested in.

As history has shown it can often be the ideas that didn't look commercial
that have proved to be very profitable a few years later.  The diversity of
interests of an open source project best places it to take advantage of 
changes the environment.
 
<snip>
> I, and all of the Gentoo developers remaining, including 
> Daniel Robbins accept this and wish him well.  Where people involved
> in Gentoo development get upset is when Zachary resorts to bad mouthing
> the project and it's contributers (principally Daniel Robbins, 
> without whom Gentoo would not exist at all) and lying about what did
> and did not happen in order to generate a lot of attention for himself 
> and his project.
>
> In terms of forking the Gentoo project : You might call it a 
> fork, but I wouldn't,  it's only the same as if I started building a 
> distro based on Debian - to my knowledge there are least 10 such distros,
> but I've never heard of Debian being a forked distribution.

Commercial spin-offs are not a bad thing as long as they don't take anything
away from the project.  Over the years there have been many distros based
on Debian (not all survived).  But I haven't heard of any stories where
these
where/are harmful.  Often the opposite is true.  They would pay some poor
bod to do some tidy up work that was needed but no one on the project wanted
to do (but they need commercially).  In other cases they donated hardware to
package maintainers where the packages were so big that a more powerful
system
that was affordable to the maintainer (Brandon's XF86 package is a good
example
of this).

> This, like almost all the challenges Gentoo faces right now, is a result
> of massive growth in the user base in the last 12 months.   Right now the
> number of registered Gentoo users doubles ever 6 weeks!

The growth rate Gentoo is seeing at the moment will make or break it.  Ian
Murdock's (on of the cofounders) original goal was for about 10 - 20
packages
(I think) maintained  by about half a dozen people (currently >8710
packages).
Long ago Murdock left and started Progeny.  Gentoo is just following in 
Debian's footsteps.

Steve