Today's post is not about this kind of SFC!

I can't write about 'this week' in blogs today as my RSS Reader is empty, everyone is on holiday and so no one is blogging anything. So I'll just do a quick rant about Gentoo instead while I eat my porridge.

By the way, in this piece about the launch of the BBC's iPlayer service, a Windows only media download service that my licence fee is paying for even though I can't use it, BBC News finally said the 'L word'. So we may be getting somewhere, we have at least moved past the "first they ignore you" phase.

Another day, another flamewar

The current tiff in Gentoo is about the fact that the trustees of the Gentoo Foundation, which is a 'not for profit' organisation registered with the State of New Mexico, have got rather behind, or simply forgotten about, the required paperwork to maintain the 'not for profit' status. So witness a another mailing list explosion and Gentoo's esteemed founder Daniel Robbins has been, depending on your perspective, offering his wisdom or flaming from the sidelines in his blog.

Meanwhile and independently of this, the Software Freedom Conservancy has offered to take care of all this non-technical stuff. The SFC would take legal liability and abstract away the paper work such as doing the accounts, claiming taxes back, interacting with government and so on. Gentoo would be able leave at any time in the future, no strings attached.

The Software Freedom Conservancy, which is somehow part of or associated with the Software Freedom Law Centre, run of course by FSF Hero Professor Eben Moglen, already performs this service for Samba, Wine, and some other projects. To me this sounds like the ideal solution for Gentoo as well.

Gentoo is run by a meritocratic community of developers. These developers are some of the most highly skilled geeks in the world, and spend much of their free time writing the ebuilds, fixing the bugs, compiling the LiveCDs, developing Gentoo's admin tools and so on. They have been selectively bred for that and are great at that, so let them get on with it.

The Gentoo developers, i.e. the genetically engineered supergeeks, may not always have the time, inclination, maturity or skills to deal with real world admin efficiently enough to allow the technical work to run. It is also pretty hard given Gentoo's current structure for any normal human beings who in terms of technical skills, are just users to contribute meaningfully, even if they have management, administration or marketing skills.

That is easier said than done, it is very hard to get people who are both good at the administration and who can grasp the technological aspects enough to allow the success to continue, rather than to take over and implement the old ways of doing things that we were taught while getting our Economics degrees or MBAs. Eben Moglen designed one of the first email systems, helped design Pascal and other languages while at IBM, then went on to become one of America's leading lawyers, famously saving PGP and personal email encryption from the US government. These kind of people do not grow on trees, if the SFC has them, then let's get 'em!

So let the SFC manage the paperwork, and let the superdevelopers get on with what they do.

As for the flamewars, it is all white heat. There are only three ways to judge the health of Gentoo: ebuilds, ebuilds and ebuilds.

Gentoo Rocks

As I have explained before, Linux distributions have different niches, but let's not forget in all the haze how good Gentoo is today.

Gentoo has more packages than any other distribution, for more processor architectures than any other distribution, and the packages are put out there faster than any other distribution. Gentoo is about choice, not only about what applications and libraries are on your system and how they look, but you can even choose how they get there, as you can even choose to use a different package manager than portage.

Gentoo also has a great set of tools: etc-update means that a Gentoo install can go on year after year without breakage, webapp-config allows you to make a new instance of a web application with one command. Through eselect, java- config and other tools, Gentoo also handles slotting really well, so if upstream projects put out incompatible versions that affect your services or applications, (Java or PHP for example), it doesn't matter as Gentoo will allow you to run incompatible versions simultaneously with no effort or human interaction required.

If the new packages are coming out faster, more stable and more optimised than anyone else, I do not care how much white heat is produced in the Gentoo devs' mailing lists or on the developers' blogs, let them eat each other for all I care, as long as my system runs well and I can do what I want with it.

Forgetting some paperwork is not the end of the world. After all, being in rather more trouble with the authorities never hurt Microsoft! In any case, Gentoo is always had bad press and will always get bad press, it is easier to poke fun than take the time to understand something.

Part of this is because many technical reporters (and even some bloggers) are writing on a deadline and are often forced to be quite superficial, anything that cannot be tried out in an afternoon does not get featured until something bad happens. Gentoo is not fast food made in factories and available in an instant, it is a slowly cooked dinner made from free range meat and fresh vegetables from the garden.

Like Gentoo, part of the point of free and open source software is the freedom to choose what is good for you. If your criteria for a Linux distro is that they are really good at their own paperwork, then I am sure the not-'free as in beer' distros will be there for you (Novell not included :) ).

Gentoo is not there for you to remotely provide IT support to your relatives, or for first time Linux users, Ubuntu and so on are there for that. However, if you want a distribution that is great for technically advanced users, web developers, programmers, high-end supercomputers, and so on, then Gentoo could be for you.