Heya Matt, On 1/5/06, Matthew Marlowe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Other than small improvements, > I'm not sure anything positive has happened. If anything, > Gentoo appears to be heading more in the "desktop" > and "hobbyist" direction.
Server-orientated activities have historically never had the same standing in Gentoo that desktop-oriented activities have had. Under the old organisational structure, those of us actively working on server stuff (such as Apache) had no voice in the old TLP meetings. Thankfully, that has been addressed. The new metastructure creates a totally-level playing field, where motivated individuals and teams are really free to work on creating a strong server-oriented following. But that doesn't help if no-one's turning up to participate. Gentoo's strength is that it reflects the interests, committments, and experience of the people who work on it. It's not like RedHat Enterprise Linux, which reflects an agenda defined in a boardroom, or by a commercial partnership with a vendor that benefits only a select few customers. It takes its life and its energy from those who work on it. We come from a diverse background, and we bring a diverse range of needs that we want Gentoo to be suitable for. To the outside world, it appears that we lack focus, but I believe the real truth is that we're just really poor at communicating the many different directions that we're going in. (As an aside, I personally find it very frustrating when we have individuals strongly arguing against attempts to improve our communications like the news GLEP, and then some of these same people turn around and plead ignorance on strategic work going on in the project. Duplicious behaviour like this is our own worst enemy, and turns what should be smoothly-flowing work into horrendous log jams). And, equally, it suffers when people withdraw that energy - or (as seems to be more and more the case these days) when people stop enjoying what they do and lose the motivation to continue working on the project. We've always had a problem of burnout amongst devs, and to be honest I see that as a natural thing that we have to live with. Not worried about that, and if they come back their contribution always seems to be even better than it was before. We also seem to have regular "it's the end of the world" threads like this (it's not the end of the world, btw). More (any? :) regular face-to-face contact would help with that. Other leading f/oss projects establish a culture of the key devs seeing each other regularly on the conference circuit. I think this is where we should start to sort things out - by making it possible for people to learn more about each other properly, and to gain a better understanding of each other's needs. It'll give us the foundations to build further change and improvement on. > That might be what they mean > when they say gentoo is becoming irrelevant. Gentoo's going to become irrelevant because today we're not collectively capable of making that step to becoming a world-class organisation. You've got three world-class organisations at the top table - Red Hat, Novell/SuSE, and now Ubuntu. There's only room for so many. We have to decide whether we really want to play at that level, or whether we'd rather be playing in the sandpit and the slop dosh with the other kids instead. Do we want to raise our game to that level, or not? (Btw, irrelevant doesn't mean no more Gentoo. When I contributed to Slackware in the early 90's, it sent the trends and the standards that other distros aspired to. Today, although Pat continues to provide an excellent distro, what he does no longer matters on the world stage. One of the four fundamental human psycological needs is to leave a legacy. If Gentoo no longer matters, you're not going to get those world-class people coming along and contributing. They're going to go where their work has more impact. It's why we've already lost good people to Ubuntu. Gentoo will just suffle along in a state of living death - just like Slackware arguably does today. You need that constant influx of new people to renew and revigorate any project or organisation). Many of our devs have never had any exposure to the sort of culture-driven environment Kurt's talking about. I know what Kurt's proposing has been rubbished savagely here on the mailing list (and those savagings have been roundly cheered in #gentoo-dev during the day). In world-class professional organisations they're seen as standard practice and sound, effective solutions. They're not "text book" solutions, or an "ideal world" that doesn't work in reality. They're not fads, or fashions of their time. Every time I hear or read people say that (and not just in a Gentoo context - I hear this regularly from organisations and individuals I work with outside Gentoo) I must admit I cringe a bit. In my experience, it's normally used as an argument to cover up limits in individuals' personal performance and their ability to raise their game to the required level. They're just de facto standard best practice, no different to (say) how the ITIL is for IT service management. Anyway, if we do want to steer the Good Ship Gentoo away from the iceberg, I think our starting place has to be actively organising face-to-face contact. Best regards, Stu -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
