This is kinda bloggish, because it's basically a transcription of an IRC monologue. My apologies if it's hard to follow... Nonetheless, I'm interested in how other developers feel on the topics I bring up below.
There have been some really interesting points brought up recently about "where is Gentoo going?" I have been wondering that myself. Some people seem to think that Gentoo has the potential to be an enterprise player. I have not responded directly to those people, but I wonder if they know what they mean. I have worked in the enterprise UNIX market for 6 years. My code is running in places like NASA mission control, 9-1-1 call centers, and most of the telephone carriers. I've produced patches on weekends to close $800m deals. I now work in hp's Open Source and Linux Organization, mostly on RHEL and SLES, so I have a good idea of what it takes to be an enterprise player. In my humble opinion, Gentoo is missing too many points to be an enterprise Linux. We commit to a live tree. We don't have true QA, testing or tinderbox. We don't have paid staff, alpha/beta/rc cycles. We don't really have product lifecycles, since we don't generally backport fixes to older versions, requiring instead for people to update to a more recent release. We don't have, and probably will never be able to offer, support contracts. We support as wide a range of hardware as the upstream kernel, plus hardware that requires external drivers; we don't have access to a great deal of the hardware for which we provide drivers. We understand when real life gets in the way of bug-fixing, because all our developers are volunteers. I think that attempting to take Gentoo in the "enterprise" direction is a mistake. I think that we are a hobbyist distribution. This doesn't mean that we should not strive to meet some of the enterprise goals. Those things can be important to hobbyists too. But I don't think we should be aiming for corporate America. I don't even understand why that goal appeals to people. Let other distros go there! I want Gentoo to run in people's homes, in student dorm rooms, etc. Places where people want a fun distribution that they can tailor and work on easily. I like the idea of Gentoo on alternative arches and in embedded environments. Not because I want Sony to start using Gentoo on walkmans, but purely because the idea of running Linux on a PDA is cool. I'd like Gentoo to be a place where neat things are developed. If RH or SuSE (or another for-profit Linux vendor) wants to take some of those developments and use them to make a profit, that's fine with me. We're over here having fun. Also I find it amusing when people say that Gentoo exists for the users. I think that is wrong. Gentoo exists for the *developers*. It's our playground, and it's the reason we use a live tree rather than switching to an actually sane approach. The users are cool because they point out bugs, help solve problems on bugzilla, suggest enhancements, provide patches, and notify us of package updates. Sometimes they become developers. But the truth is that Gentoo sees improvement and maintenance in the areas that appeal to the developers. And that is why Gentoo exists for the developers first, the users second. Regards, Aron -- Aron Griffis Gentoo Linux Developer
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