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.

Going forward.

Well, this year started pretty nice for me. So I've decided to make few new years resolutions:

1. Learn Gentoo even more than I do now.
2. Pass Gentoo dev quiz. All of it. Not to become a developer, but to create a cause for my own learning.
3. Find alternative source of income. Blog/writing-based is preferred.
4. Get a better job or make the current one much better than it is.
5. Make Gentoo User Representatives a worthy project, so it will continue further on.
6. Visit Europe.

And another:

7. Write a Gentoo book.

Regarding the book - its the idea I have lately. I know there's a lot of information about Gentoo including official docs, wiki etc, but I still feel its hard for noobs to start with Gentoo. That's why I want to write this book. All comments/wishes are more than welcome.

Coming back

Phew!

For a looong time I haven't written anything in my blog. There are multiple reasons for that, mainly being sick a little, and holidays.

But now I'm starting to feel the urge. Writing is calling me, and I have to restate myself for that.

So, first of all - Userreps Project, which seems to be in deep deep deep hibernation is not dead. We (me and few others) had a talk about it, and decided that project lives on, and we will just get back on track with the resources we have. And then, we hope it will go smoothly.

There is also one more pleasant note for myself: I might go to FOSDEM conference!! I can meet Gentoo devs at last. So if you're a dev and reading this and don't want to see me - let me know as soon as possible. Then we can arrange something to not to bump into each other :-)

So, the new year started 1.5 months ago, and I haven't been active on Gentoo front. I sure hope it is temporal. I'm getting a laptop from work (with Windaews. yikes) in a few days, which should make me much more mobile than I'm now, so I could be more productive.

So, have a nice year everyone and we will push it forward!!

Userrep restaffing

OK, now as its not a secret anymore.

As I already said before, cokehabit was removed from his post as User Representative. It doesn't mean George is a bad person or something. Promised announcement was made on forums, but to understand reasons more clearly I suggest reading Christel's blogpost.

As you can see in that forum post, I was instated as 11th User Representative instead of George. I was flattered when suggested to do so, and of course I agreed, although the only thing that it changes in my approach is sort of responsibility I now have towards the project.

If before that I had none, now if I say something or suggest something or take upon myself something, I have to answer on that promise. That is kinda new for me in open source project, but in no way a bad thing. I'd love to contribute in any way I can, and help out as time and my knowledge will allow.

So thanks to George for his efforts and for all that he has done being User Representative.

Novell vs. Microsoft, Gnome 1.x removal, cokehabit and stuff, 14-21 Nov 2006

Well, the day for weekly stuff.

There are few things are going on. Some of them Gentoo, some are not, so lets get started:

1. I would start with Novell-Microsoft deal. Albeit not news anymore, this one caused a lot of stirring in FOSS community. If you have missed the deal, then in a nutshell: Novell will pay ~40M $ to Microsoft, and Microsoft will pay something to Novell. What is it for we do not know, but it will allow Novell to claim idemnification for its clients from MS, and also MS already started telling that Novell pays for Microsofts' intellectual property used in Novell Linux products.
While intriguing where will this thing go, I really don't think its a good idea for any linux distro to pay for "intellectual property" which is possibly used in Linux based OS. And I agree on this with Red Hat's people, saying to Steve Ballmer, "show us the violating code, and it will be removed".
That's why, by the way, Jonathan Schwartz said all those things about OS importance. He just reacted to this deal....

2. Gnome 1.x removal caused more hateful fan-mails than even xmms procedure. Which is strange, especially because of xmms removal issue. I noticed plans to remove Gnome 1.x and friends couple of weeks before, and all that despite the fact that I occasionally visit forums. I mean, that somehow information did came to me, so I don't understand how people pissed by xmms removal do not pay attention to what is happening, and then complain again about Gnome. Thats childish and unfair, BUT I do understand their behavior.
   Besides giving notification, or in addition, some other kind of warning/notification system may need to be developed to announce such things. But people should also cool their spirits and try and understand both sides - understand developers why do they decide to retire packages (trust me, its not to screw you for fun), and understand users that do not enjoy dealing with removal problems.
3. Finally!! User representatives meeting had place last weekend, and it was very cool to catch up will all of them missing in action (yes, there was some timeout as it seemed). Loki99 suggested to have a long meeting in 3-days span, which came out really great. Some of the things that were discussed were CMS system for gentoo-userreps.org (which is not very operational at the moment), and also my ideas about userdays and video docs.
   I really like hanging around those guys, they are very cool. And I have an opportunity to learn a lot there.
   
4. cokehabit was demoted as userrep. I can't (and won't) get into the details why did it happened, enough emotions get around this one as it is. I hope that userrep project will still do great and that users and developers will benefit from it.

Thats all for now, more will be here as it comes :-)

Feedback is always appreciated