The Myths and Realities of the Gentoo/Government: Part 1

This post may piss off a lot of people. I’m publishing what I have seen, that is all. If I’m wrong, I’m happy to be corrected. Daniel started this whole Gentoo thing. And while it was small, he led it. As it happens, Gentoo grew. And it grew quick and fast and beyond all expectations. It grew in size faster than it did in maturity. Yes, I say “it” because I refer to the entity of Gentoo: the collective consciousness of the Gentoo community of developers and users, if you will. The growth was unmanaged. That’s not a criticism, it’s just fact. I’m not sure how the growth could have been managed, to be honest, though I do know that we could have done a lot of things differently.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of talk all over the place about how Gentoo should be governed, how it should be led (if it should be led at all), what its goals are, and so on. And these are good questions, and great discussions to be had. One thing I’ve noticed (and perhaps even I am guilty of it) is the idealisation of the days gone by. To many of us, those were the “good old days.”

Let me put to rest any and all illusions. Those days were frustrating as hell as well. Someone might make a decision in their little sub-project, and then find out later that that decision got overridden by Daniel. A lot of bad blood came out of episodes like that. Hell, Daniel and I had numerous encounters like that. Anyway, there was a lot of back-talking and whispering and just downright frustration with this idea of “all the power in one place.”

Daniel was hip to the fact that the distro was outgrowing itself, so he did his best to evolve with it. He, with a few others, developed the metastructure project, and designated a bunch of “Top Level Projects” that made up the core components of Gentoo. To my recollection there were 6 of those. Each project already had a leader of sorts, and those leaders pretty much became the official advisory board to Daniel: a board of managers, I suppose. All decisions would be made by the board, but Daniel had the power of veto. This point is crucial, so remember it, kids, because we’ll return to it.

Well, that was not enough for some people (3 in particular that I know of for sure, from first-hand conversation and from first-hand confrontation). They idealised a more distributed power structure. Since then, one has changed his mind, one has disappeared entirely, and one is too busy to spend much time on Gentoo. There was a fourth, and he went off to form the Zynot foundation — as a “fork” of Gentoo. My thoughts on the idiocy (zydiocy?) of that episode are not for this posting, but I may expound on that in a later entry.

That’s just a bit of history. I’ll talk about the current state in the next post.

Flame away, if you must.