On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 11:29, Timothy James Friesen wrote: > Did the person that forked fork it because he wasn't going to be making any > money from Gentoo? That's the impression I'm getting from all of this. Feel > free to correct me if I'm wrong.
My reading of the article indicated that he considered Gentoo as an investment of his time and money for the eventual goal of using it in a for-profit manner as has happened with Gentoo Games. He seems to have put some serious money into Gentoo - he says almost all of the servers, as the most obvious example, but also funding for Daniel and setting up the now almost essential Oregon State mirror. Zach does feel put off and ignored when Gentoo Games was formed and Gentoo Embedded was not, especially when Daniel told Zach that Daniel had no plans to pursue Gentoo Embedded a day after registering the domain. I didn't understand the whole contract thing, but apparently Zach was to be the man in control of Gentoo Embedded in the eventual future when it was formed, and he says that Daniel cut him out of it. Or so I understand. It's not that he just showed up and then got pissed he didn't get rich - he made an investment and feels as though he was cheated out of a contract. At least he's not suing - that would be ugly. > Now, if that's the case, what's to stop this Zynot guy from acting the same as > Daniel Robbins? Supposedly Zynot will be getting a Debian-like Board of Directors quickly, and when that happens, the project is out of his control if he is not on the Board. Even so, he won't be the only one with power, and most importantly, he won't be the majority owner of a for-profit company that is asking the community to assign the company copyright of the community's work. Ever looked at an ebuild? Most of them, regardless of the author, are sole property of the for-profit Gentoo Technologies, Inc. of which Daniel is the majority owner. The difference between the organization is that Daniel is the "Chief Architect" while Zach says he is a temporary stand-in. As I understand the new reorganization, Daniel will still be the "Chief Architect" if not in name, but there will be more control by other developers. Zach did go on to say that he feels the very recent Gentoo reorganization was an effort to undermine his fork, and true or not, the reorganized Gentoo and the new Zynot share a lot more in common than the old Gentoo and the new Zynot would have. > I'm interested to know more of this, but am wondering if the current forker is > really the right person to be supporting. My impressions are that he may not > be as pro community as he says he is. At this point it sounds like he's the > only one involved, and is not ready to give up control to a group any time > soon. I'm not sure if he's the right person either - I'm very unhappy that Daniel has decided not to respond properly. He left it at 'this guy is slanderous and lying', but did not go any further. To me, that's like waving a list of card-carrying Communists in the government - no one wants to hear Daniel and Zach FUD each other, but if Daniel doesn't respond to some of the more pressing claims Zach's story is the only one to go by. Daniel might not need to prove his innocence, but given that several developers have left for the same reasons, it would be a show of good faith to the community.
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