Political Gentoo

So, the last week has been kinda weird.

First, I was sad to witness bitterness and some sort of despair in Gentoo community. Lot of people feel that something isn't right, but at the same time there's a feeling that nothing could be done to fix it.

I'd suggest the following:
All Gentoo developers take the leave from working on Gentoo and have a break to have some fun in their own private lives. Then, in 30 days, council should be brought back to urgent meeting about future of Gentoo, with the following contributors:
1. Project/Subproject Leads
2. Developers
3. Users
Then, decide upon Gentoo's future, both technical (what is Gentoo? where should it be heading?) and social (what is devrel/userrel/userreps? how do they perform? how do they enforce policies? are policies well understood by all parties?)
And then, come back and start making great things together.

I know, I know, it just sounds great to me and will never be implemented.

It is sad, because Gentoo is a great distribution and a great technical effort made by community. I understand, that in free community you can only count on yourself or long-known peers, as it is free, disperse and voluntary. But many such communities choose to follow some sort of netiquette, which explains sort of a etiquette expected from all the members, and also establishes some way of enforcing an appropriate behavior.

Is bad behavior allowed in free community? Yes. It should, as "bad" is only subjective, and being "bad" means saying and/or doing something others do not like or want. But in free society, all things should be allowed.

But what should one do, when these things hurt or insult someone else? Well, in "democracy", there's a concept of decision making. If there's a majority for decision, but the decision itself implies hurting the minority, then the decision is banned as "non-democratic".

Which means, that "bad" behavior can be tolerated but some "objective" countability should be established and sort of "punishment" will have place. Punishment, in general, will be either temporal or permanent removal from society.

So how can all this be done with free community such as Gentoo? I don't know. I just hope, that despair that I feel inside the community is temporary, and soon will be dealt with.

I really love Gentoo, both technically and socially, and I'm ready to provide any help necessary and I will gladly do anything I can (and "official Gentoo" will accept) to make things better.

Second, on a side note: I got a Gentoo T-shirt for my birthday! So geeky....

FOSDEM event

Oh my.

I officially declare: FOSDEM 07 was awesome!!

I was not really sure I want to come anyways. Too much stress, expensive, all the logistics - all seemed too much for me.

But, for my own surprise, it came out much better that I'd thought it would. Everyone was some amazingly helpful, that I had one of the greatest experiences in my life.

First, when I came, Patrick (bonsaikitten) was kind enough to meet me and help me out around Brussels. Greatest thanks for that Patrick!!

When I came, he already met another Gentoo developer - Rob (or handsome Rob, as other dev calls him) aka hyakuhei. We went wandering around tourist area of Brussels. After we had some junkfood, we went straight to the Friday Beer event - a bar, which was exploded by a geeks storm. There were like couple of hundred geeks in fairly small area, so me and Rob left after awhile cause we were sorta dead tired.

We went to a hostel, where it took time until I got a bed to sleep in (thanks to diox for help with a hostel btw), and I crushed.

Next day was the first day of the conference itself. It was amazing. First, I finally met christel who remembered who I am and was sincerely happy to meet me. After we had listened a lecture from an OLPC guy, we (as in christel, Rob, Stephen - spb and myself) went to find something to eat. We finished up in crepes place and had a crepes and coffee.

After that I met many other devs I've been talking to in IRC before, and it was actually really cool to finally meet people in person.

Then, I went to overblown lecture on OpenMoko by Sean Moss-Pultz. It was great, and everyone in the lecture room was ready to get this Neo phone immediately.

Then, it was a Gentoo's panel with council, and then it was restaurant dinner with all the developers who came to FOSDEM and some other users/guests (including myself and Q-collective, another userrep).

I had a little argument with Danny (kugelfang, one of the council members) about the best ways of teaching physics, as I have my BA in this and he's on his way to diploma (equivalent to Masters).

Then, we went with few devs to have a beer, as Rob said he owns one to phreak (a dev who was his mentor and recruter). It was cool. Rob went to make some pictures, but it was too cold, so we went back to the hostel.

Then I came back to a hostel and crushed again, as I was tired. But before I actually could go to sleep, I found that latest update for dbus completely broke gtk-based everything (and that includes Gnome), so I was like with laptop but without X. Guess what do geeks at 2am in one room with non-operational laptop? Trying to fix it.

Thanks to genstef and full room of other people I don't remember (drop me a note if you've fixed someone's laptop at 2am Saturday night and I'll fill your name here :-) ) for at least finding a problem :-)

So Sunday was a sort of fun, as I only went to a Mike's (vapier) lecture on a council thing, and embedded, and christel's one on gentoo community, after which we with Rob had to go, because we had our flights home.

So we parted everyone, and off home we went.

It was awesomely best social event I've been at in ages, and I'm so happy I met all these cool people.

So, thanks to bonsaikitten for meeting me (oh, and Patrick - congrats on getting that PhD thing, I wanted to have a toast for that but forgot completely), Rob (hyakuhei), Christel, nattfodd, genstef, diox and many others for having me there and making me feel like I'm one of you.

I'm very appreciative for that.

I'll have photos posted as soon as I can.