Zynot Foundation Forks Gentoo

deque_alpha writes "The Gentoo Linux distribution has been forked by a group of Gentoo developers and community members. This fork is being placed under the control of the non-profit Zynot Foundation, which will "hold the source code, trademarks, and any other intellectual property developed by and for its community." The goals of the fork include improving stability and cross-platform reliability to bring the Gentoo-developed technology to the enterprise and embedded arenas." Another reader points out Zack Welch's long article at Zynot.org on reasons for forking the Gentoo distribution.

Re:It's only tyranny when someone else is in charg

[rainwalker]

If you read a bit further,

...I would expect to no longer need to exercise dictatorial control after the bylaws have been initially established...new directors will be elected by the community...

and so on. This document implies that he himself could be removed from the board of directors once it is run completely by the community, although I doubt that would happen.

Daniel Robbins' Reply:

[kikawala]

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/ 9606 [gmane.org]

Re:Hardneded Gentoo

[KentoNET]

You miss the point, though. The true admin of the server can still do whatever he wants, by authenticating with the SELinux policy system. Even if the server gets rooted, it's all for naught without being able to authenticate with SELinux. If you understand anything about security, you know how valuable that can be for a system that needs hardcore security.

Re:Where is a fork going to get the bandwidth?

[Arker]

Gentoo requires lots of donated hosting and bandwidth. The amount of resources used in rsync alone must be huge. Where is this guy going to get the backing to make this even feasible?

If you read the article he claims that much of their existing infrastructure is either directly or indirectly on loan from him...

Re:Debian

[xenocide2]

Instead the weekly news summary is filled with the joyous harmony of discussion on why certain liscences deserve to be punished for not being free enough. I like the debian package system but theres a lot of far out techno-politicals involved as well. I guess it hasn't been to large of a turn off though since I'm still using it ;).

Re:Gentoo for embedded systems

[srichman]

No, they do actually want to run Portage on embedded devices. From the "Reasons for Forking" document:

There are numerous outstanding issues with Portage that have been documented as part of the embedded project, and even Nick Jones, the Portage architect, has been considering the possibility of a rewrite for quite some time. Further, the current implementation language (Python) is not well-suited for many embedded systems; a rewrite in a lower level language (e.g. C/C++) will eventually be required to reach all targeted platforms.

Re:Wow

[avenj]

Actually we're going nonprofit soon. This has been repeatedly mentioned on the gentoo-dev mailing list by drobbins.

Re:As a Gentoo user...

[avenj]

When have we ever tried to pass ourselves off as a nonprofit? We're currently a for-profit. We're going nonprofit soon. We've always been upfront about our current situation. We're not making any money, by the way.

Re:-1, Flamebait

[asteinberg]

I think you're right on, except for the "it's still the best source-based distro out there" comment. Though I haven't really been following it recently (ever since I saw the light and switched to Debian, I haven't really looked back to the source-based distros), I suspect Source Mage might give Gentoo a run for its money.

When Source Mage was first being formed (which itself was after a series of ugly fork-related situations) everyone made sure to put a lot of effort into creating strong Debian-like guidelines to ensure that it would be controlled by its community and not have to deal with the corruption that seems to be present at Gentoo. It will be interesting to see if this controversy will push any users toward switching to Source Mage. More info about it here [sourcemage.org].

Though of course, I must say, you should probably save yourself the trouble of compiling all that crap anyway and just get yourself a real [debian.org] distro.

He's back!

[Dalcius]

Daniel Robbins's reply [gmane.org] reads like it was written by the Iraqi Information Minister...

Where have you been, dipshit?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original [xfree.org]

The fork [xwin.org]

Thats just the two versions of XFree86, I havn't even bothered to include any commercial X servers (E.g. Metro, Sun etc.)

Re:It's only tyranny when someone else is in charg

[emh0]

If you read further still,

How will the board of directors be elected?

At three month intervals, new directors will be elected by the community in order to fill all vacant seats on the board; each director so elected shall serve on the board for a term of one year, and no individual shall be allowed to serve more than three successive terms.

He is limiting himself to no more than 3 years as a director, so he cannot be accused of attempting to run it dictatorially after its initial creation.

Re:Gentoo for embedded systems

[treke]

Apt+dpkg are quite large for PDA's, weighing in at 1.5 megs after pruning out the obvious things like manual pages. Apt is also dependent on libstdc++, which is another 600k. 2.1 megs for package management, not the greatest idea when you are dealing with a device with only 16MB of onboard storage space.

Alternativly you can use ipkg, which is rather buggy, but has the benefit of fitting in 116KB of space. Compiling just frightens me. Some of this stuff takes a while to compile on my desktop.

Re:Could be a great thing

[ichimunki]

Ian Murdock handed the reins of the Debian project to Bruce Perens in 1996. Progeny was founded three years later in 1999. To say that the kind of control that Gentoo Inc has over Gentoo Linux is similar to any relationship between Progeny and Debian is to stretch the comparison to the breaking point if you ask me.