Some are Boojums--

(If you saw an empty post on planet/universe, my apologies. I need to work on my pyblosxom workflow, it seems.)

The real power base of Gentoo is not infra, the Council, the trustees, or devrel. It's the developers. We have the credit and the blame for what Gentoo is, has been, and will become.

Before that, though, a quick comment about Seemant's recent posts about poisonous individuals (http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/seemant.php). I think Seemant makes a number of good points, but I have a different interpretation of many of those events than Seemant has. I'll cover some of them below, but let me address his comments about Kurt Lieber here. I think Seemant is wrong in his assessment of Kurt. Oh, the facts are essentially correct: Kurt was in charge of infra, he was one of the primary people pushing to extract the reins from drobbins hands, and he strongly pushed for the establishment of the Gentoo Foundation. He's also bright, and frequently sure of himself even when he's wrong, and when he eventually does lose his temper he can be just as inflammatory as some of the more infamous of our community. I also have little doubt that Kurt believed that if he were in charge of Gentoo, then things would be better. Nonetheless, I don't believe that Kurt was subtly trying to become Gentoo's Svengali. What I did see was that Kurt had a different mindset from many of the devs (myself included). Kurt viewed things from an infra perspective and with big-business sensibilities: security should be paramount, devs are a potential threat as well as an asset, enterprise Gentoo should be a goal, etcetera. (Of course infra has a culture of mistrust; that's their job. It's also why infra is lower on the organizational chart than the Council.) It was hardly surprising that Kurt would clash with Seemant and others (again, including myself) from time to time, given those differences of opinion.

Okay, back to the real point of this post.

Once upon a time, Gentoo was drobbins' baby. It was his project, his guiding philosophy, and his say as to who was a dev, and who wasn't. Becoming a dev was mainly a matter of submitting ebuilds and patches until somebody got tired of committing them to CVS on your behalf, and decided that it would just be easier if you were a dev so that you could do it yourself. In those days I knew the name of everybody in #gentoo (or was it #gentoo-dev, I don't remember). Whether due to drobbins' ideology or sheer pragmatism, during that period Gentoo established a defining tradition of our community: we provide our devs with nearly unfettered access to make changes, and we trust them not to do anything too stupid (or at least to fix things if they do). The idea is that our talented devs with time and ability _should_ be able to make sweeping changes when need be. As such, Gentoo is very much a distribution founded on trust, and that tradition of trusting our devs survives to this day.

It may have been a golden age, but it was hardly perfect. Drobbins had vision, but he could also be capricious and dismissive when somebody disagreed with him. He had to learn management skills on the job, and although he got much, much better, he occasionally made mind-blowing mistakes. Early devrel would often do a great job, but sometimes turn around and collectively blow up at somebody, shattering any good will they had built up. Read through the various bugs and mailing lists, and you'll see that the current mistrust that Gentoo devs have for powerful groups is perfectly rational, even though it is remarkably unhelpful. Learning to govern ourselves properly has been _hard_.

It's important to note, though, that we're not done yet. Right now Gentoo is a barely-herded collection of projects. The elected Council has some power, but neither they nor the devs who elected them have really come to terms with how much they have. I would say that the current Council is trusted not to do anything too awful, but not really trusted to actually do much that is useful. They are working to change that, though, however slowly they may be moving. Meanwhile, Gentoo is still growing (yes, we are still gaining new devs far faster than we lose old ones), and we're still putting out new releases and maintaining the tree, so there's time to work on figuring things out.

So, what does the future hold for Gentoo? I've no idea, but I expect good things. I predict that we won't return to the days of a single strong leader, despite the number of folks who seem to think that doing so would solve all of our problems. Those folks might be correct, except for the niggling fact that leading Gentoo is a full-time job, with no pay, and so we haven't seen a lot of people stepping up to the plate to do that job. Sorry, Seemant, but we're going to have to learn to live with an elected governance committee, I suspect. Will we turn into Debian? Yes, and no. Gentoo is a rare beast--a community distribution. Almost all of the work is done by volunteers, and those volunteers will only work on what they want to work on. Not everybody will agree, so lengthy discussions on -dev aren't going away. In those respects, we're very much like Debian. Similarly, we do most of our work out in the open, so all of our disagreements and spats are available for all to see. Ideologically, though, we're still quite different. We're less rules-bound, we tend to favor pragmatism over ideological purity, and we favor flexibility and power over stability.

I do hope that we can overcome this current lack of courtesy on the mailing lists, irc, etcetera. I have no good suggestions on how to accomplish this goal, I'm afraid, but I can offer one bit of history. Back in the day, I helped to write the infamous Gentoo etiquette guide. My assumption was that it was a gentle guide-to-the-clueless on how to behave without causing too much friction. I never expected that anybody would actually try to enforce it, especially not without running it by the rest of the community first. Any solution in Gentoo has to have the support of the majority of devs, or it's worse than useless.

If you've made it this far, I'm quite impressed!

A few minor thoughts:

• Ciaranm suggested that the heated discussion between he and drobbins was an attempt by drobbins to grab power. I doubt it. He just believed that he understood the problem and knew precisely how to fix it. Impressive hubris, and he got smacked down pretty hard, but that's different from malice.
• Most devs are working hard on their own areas, and ignoring all of this stuff. Thank goodness.
• Darn, I miss danarmak. Feel free to return anytime, Dan!