Gentoo Officially Not-For-Profit 227
iswm writes "The paperwork for the Gentoo Not-For-Profit entity was approved by the State of New Mexico today. This means that as of today, the Gentoo Foundation is an official Not-For-Profit Corporation in the United States. The process of becoming a Federally-recognized not-for-profit entity, which will take about six months for approval, can now begin."
no more taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
The compiler jokes are becoming boring (Score:5, Insightful)
Making these jokes is getting to be worse than the zealots who made the ill-advised compiler flag comments in the first place.
Gentoo is an impressive distribution, although admittedly it has its faults (find me a distribution that doesn't). I'm glad I got to experiment with it before it became fashionable to make derogatory jokes about it. Tthere's a fair chance all the +5 funny/insightful diminishing comments might have deterred me.
Re:How about FOR profit? (Score:2, Insightful)
A question I always put to capitalist people is "What do you deem to be *ENOUGH* money?" to which I can never seem to get an answer.
I fail to understand the mechanics of using money to just make more money. Surely there is a point when you have enough money (say, to buy that new Learjet or something) in which case there is some goal to aim for.
This is why I never understand the pro-Microsoft people who always quote the "$60 billion in the bank" figure.
So what? That money's not *doing* anything apart from sitting their getting bigger.
Call me a Communist hippy or whatever but I find life's more fun when I *don't* spend any of it thinking about money...
Re:Okay, a question... (Score:2, Insightful)
It offers a lot in the way of flexibility unlike the binary only distributions, but it's not for the impatient or new linux users.
Being that Gentoo is sourced based and community driven you will find pieces of it that come from every other major distribution which is pretty darn cool when you think about it. One of the first things that attracted me was the ability to make changes to it and get a system built that matched my needs and being able to work so closely with the developers to effect long term change.
Hope you find what your looking for..
Re:The compiler jokes are becoming boring (Score:4, Insightful)
The idiots that moan about compile times don't understand the timesavings of just doing an "emerge" occasionally to update the system after it's built. Sure, it's not foolproof but then what OS is?
Gentoo has a cool attitude - to just make a damn good product and not give a damn about how much money they can make from it.
Re:How about FOR profit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our software is GPL'd. You're welcome to pursue this. We chose a different path.
Re:How about FOR profit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Capitalists are not about making money, they are about destroying it. A capitalist wants to concentrate all of the wealth in one person.
I'm not necessarily a capitalist but I do have those impulses and I can tell you that given free reign, that is where they would lead.
*ENOUGH* money (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is a hijacking of the concept of 'money'. 'Money' was originally meant to be a means of extended barter. You need a chicken, I need work done on my house, but I have spare corn instead of a chicken. We could find a third party that needs corn, and has a chicken. Or we could come up with 'money' that lets us extend our barter system into a marketplace, and allows all goods to become more liquid.
Unfortunately, for some people money has turned into a measure of self-esteem. They're not even collecting castles, or jet planes, or home theaters, or any sort of goods, any more. They measure their success by incrementing digits.
Also unfortunately, as much as we'd like to think of the economy as an expanding pie that has room for everyone to get as much as they want without depriving others, it just isn't. Though there is some expansion, the finite size of the pie is painfully apparent to many. In order for the more successful to tick their digits upward, they end up taking away from others. In other terms, this can be called 'downsizing', 'offshoring', 'making benefits competitive', and the like.
Why this use of money is bad is that it's so easy to tick digits upward. Had these people been accumulating toys and property, it would be more obviously outrageous.
The nifty thing about a gift economy is that it lets you measure your self-esteem through contribution. But it does need to piggyback on top of a money economy, because goods in the real world aren't free, and we all need to eat and get out of the rain.
Finding the balance between gift and money economies, and getting Joe 6pak to buy into that balance, is the task for TruenGenius.
Re:The compiler jokes are becoming boring (Score:3, Insightful)
All in all despite the odd hiccup, gentoo has been a very positive experience.
Gentoo icon? (Score:3, Insightful)
(insert joke that the Gentoo icon is still compiling here...)
CB
Re:Okay, a question... (Score:3, Insightful)
supports chroot, including another partition), gives me a clean base system
without anything I didn't ask for, makes installing and updating software a
breeze, and has a community that is active and friendly.
Basically, I like it for all the reasons I like BSD.
rtfb (Score:3, Insightful)