Its another talk about the foundation; I have to be the only non trustee who even bothers to talk about it. The reason for this one is quite interesting actually. I got a chance to sit down and have a nice long talk with seemant about a lot of issues surrounding the Foundation, Council and other area’s of gentoo in general.

For those who are developers this won’t be any new news but for the users this will be. Most if not all herds/projects have a few members that do the vast majority of the work to keep that project alive and floating. This has over my time with gentoo become very transparent, and i’m curious if its just a general state of apathy with developers. One solution I could think of would be to basically clear out all people in the herdlist for each project. Then add back only those who’ve done something fairly recently, and consistently. That’d shrink a lot of herds down in members, and probably show quite a few dev’s who are part of something now who really don’t do anything for any project. It might also kick their ass into motion, to start doing something. If not then quite frankly its time for them to retire from being a full dev.

Part of the reason I mention the above is that gentoo needs a good transfusion of blood so to speak. We rely heavily on a few people (all projects do in the open source community, as in the business world). In the foundation that’s seemant doing the 501(C)6 stuff with the lawyers (thank you for your assistance lawyers.). Grant doing the financial reports (*poke* I’m still looking for the 1st quarters by the way. How did the talks with paypal go as well?) and probably one of the core members of the trustee’s. The final person that I see doing a good amount is spyderous, who happens to be doing the bank transfer stuff so that all trustee’s can deal with the money in the accounts etc. I’d like to see all three of them back on the trustee board for another year. However like all things  we need some young new people to help get things moving and keep going.

Now this hasn’t been discussed really as far as I can tell, but that’s three devs out of the original thirteen that have appeared to do something productive for the project. At least three have left for one reason or another as well. Its a rough start, and as part of that, its being considered to lower the number of trustee’s down to seven. It’d create hopefully a tighter knit group who can be as productive and active as the Council is.

So that raises the question of who is going to run if they were suggested, or would want to. That is a problem as the Foundation is thought of as the boring dull stuff; that no one wants to do with their own finances or legal wrangling that confuse even the most versed in legal jargon. That perception however needs to change, as does the overall perception of the Foundation. Its as intricate a part of the Gentoo Project as GCC.

I’d love to put my feet where my mouth is, and go for becoming one of the trustee’s like a few of the current trustee’s have suggested, and I’m sure would put me in for nomination if they could. Alas, its not meant to be this year as I’m about 6 months short of having been a developer long enough. I’m sure though that the trustee’s will find some way for me to help out on a committee or such. Please also note that elections are coming up very soon, so please start considering running or nominating people who will actually take action.

Well, thats slightly annoying, part of the post got deleted. Anyways during the last LWE, a couple of developers mentioned that the lack of a gentoo business card was somewhat  embarrassing. To hopefully solve that and give up a fairly professional looking business card. I went about creating one that I hope most developers will like. This design can be found here. For those curious its approximately 30 USD for 250 glossy cards at Office Depot’s printing service, a decent deal from the looks of it. Also with 250 of them I don’t think you’ll run out in the near future. If you have comments feel free to let me know.

I’d also like to thank the trustee’s for putting up with me and my pokes to make sure things that are not related to development but are important for our status as a non profit organization, money issues, and staying on track with requirements that we have within the charter. Spyderous has actually called me on poking people to help out with what I’ve been poking about. Once I get some information from him I should hopefully have some good news to report fairly soon about of the issues we need to take care of.

As always, the x86 team needs you as a Arch Tester. Come join us in #gentoo-x86 of freenode to find out if its something you want to do.

Sorry to the people who’ve had issues with rss on my site. I just noticed it tonight. Luckily it’s only been for the past two days, but slightly annoying I know. It was caused by my neglecting to check everything I should of when I moved the box over to the new machine.

That is correct I’m now running my site off a nice little mini itx machine. I’ve also use about 1/4 of the power I was using before on the p3 500 machine, I’m liking the savings. It’ll pay for itself fairly quickly. Just not as quickly if power was priced like gas. So far I’ve been quite happy with it. The thing that has been annoying me more then anything lately though has actually been the new linksys router. The v1 wrt54gs I has died, and well it was replaced with a v5, which as everyone knows isn’t flashable. Its also a dang slight slower on most everything then the old one was. I’m glad I didn’t buy the router though. I’ll be getting a buffalo when I do though. Its flashable which was one of the reasons I originally bought the wrt.

Beyond that I’ve yet to send the laptop in for repair with asus…I’m a slacker on that. I should take a few minutes to write up the what etc of the story and then wrap it up without the parts they want me to take out and send to them. I just don’t want to be without the machine. Even if I could bring the work laptop home it’d just not be the same.

Finally, got some new headphones that make the audiophile in me quite happy. I’ll have to take them with me to work and use them as well. Its seriously like night and day between this pair and the pair I had been using.

ps. still seeking at’s for the x86 project. Ping me on irc.freenode.net if you are interested .I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. I’m happy to answer any questions and decide if being a AT is really what you want to do.

Upcoming is the elections for the new Trustee’s and spyderous made a interesting comment to me about becoming one. The problem is that I will only have been a developer for 6 months when they begin and well, that’s not nearly long enough to be considered. As well I won’t be able to vote either as I’m too young. Though that has never stopped high school kids from drinking or smoking. Maybe I can find a way to stuff the ballot *grin*. What actually came about out of the talk was committee’s and the possibility of actually creating one so that if nothing else if I feel up to it I can help out with stuff, like say the quarterly reports that as a non profit we need to get out. That should be coming out this weekend as I poked Grant about it, like i did with Corey before him. Gotta keep on the up and up with that stuff.

Tonight was a bit odd, as it seems that the first thing people who’ve I’ve poked about something previously come up and I say hi, they update me about the status of what I had poked about. Now I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, I might just decide to get a complex about it and not ask anything. I’m sure that’d make a couple of the trustee’s happy *wink*

Additionally I picked up a bit of responsibility as well recently. As anyone who has hung out in the x86 channel might of noticed, I tend to take a leading role  in helping people who want to help into the Arch Testers group for our little x86 project, and as such I’ve stepped up, been tossed into, thrown to the wolves or any other saying you want to use been bumped to being the main contact for the x86 Arch Testers. It’ll be interesting as I enjoy seeing the dedication of the users and hopefully that dedication of helping out will turn into hopefully more developers down the road. If the x86 teams at program turns out half as successful as the amd64 teams has for new developers, we’ll have a fresh injection of mountain dew into the dev stream *grin*

It still till this day strikes me as entirely odd, that when I joined I had talked about being a minor developer who did a bit here and a bit there and just sort of hid in the background. I’ve somehow managed to at least it appears to me have gone the entirely opposite direction and get poked quite a bit for help with various things. I’m also enjoying it pretty much as much as I did before. I just don’t try to put up with the politics that seem to happen, but still remain the person who is approachable. I guess the main point is that I’m here, I’m staying, and i want time to work on my own projects! help!

Oh and yes people wanting to help the x86 can feel free  to come poke me now more then ever. I’m just asking for trouble with that statement.