Daniel has again blogged which will again cause a stir. I will of course naturally respond. Not that anyone did not expect this of me. I would however like to ask, and ask the users who want him back to ask him to participate in the -nfp mailing list discussions.

It appears that there are two interim trustees - Grant Goodyear and Paul de Vrieze.

On this point neither of them are interim, as they were elected to the positions over a year ago now and continue to be the elected bodies for the Foundation in the application for reinstatement state it is currently. The last election did not succeed as we did not have enough people running. Renat (rl03) was the only Trustee to run again, there were 3 others who were nominated to run. That shows that Daniel is correct in the fact that developers don’t really want to deal with the legal side of things. There are a few exceptions to that point but its true for most of the people who’d be members of the Trustees. It was also one of the factors of why there was going to be a separation of the legal from the technical.

I was able to speak to him on the phone today, and he told me that it would be “legally weird” for him to hand over the reigns of Gentoo to me without a vote of the members, which prior trustees have decided are essentially Gentoo developers who have been volunteering for the project for a year or more.

As the president of the foundation the initial bylaws you would of had to approve of the bylaws as well. The cvs entry for the website for those is 2005, however to be incorporated in the first place bylaws had to be in place upon which the current ones have a few modifications, not sweeping changes that you seem to consider done in your comment here. You even mention that Grant just filed the paperwork that was requested to remove you as the President of the Foundation, and you’re requesting to come back as the President. Which is it now, cause quite frankly I’m confused if you want to be removed or reinstated?

However, he did not attempt to organize a vote last week, to my knowledge.

A vote was not cast last week, as the larger community of developers wanted to actually slow down. Renat, and Grant wanted to set one up but people wanted to evaluate the various options available to them. You can’t blame people for wanting to be careful about a decision and giving ~1 week for discussion and a vote on an issue that many people needed to get up to date with is a bit unrealistic. You as a developer know very well how Gentoo works, and that it was unlikely that the deadline would be met.

However, I did place a deadline on my offer for a reason - so my offer couldn’t be used to drag me into an extremely long-term and political Gentoo decision-making process against my will.

As far as I’m aware the offer is still on the table, unless you are pulling it from the table? If its on the table then there might be some questions for clarification but I don’t see why you would be pulled into any kind of long-term discussion/decision making progress, just asked to clarify your points and give better definition to long term goals and steps to take in the shorter term that would make steps towards this larger long term goals. That’s one area that I’ve asked three times for clarification personally, however I’ve heard no response with detailed suggestions.

snip… previous paragraph through this last comment
So I am not willing to change my offer to accommodate the direction the Foundation (Grant, essentially) wants to take.

Grant is far from the only person who wants to go this direction, and is currently working to get the Foundation back into a legally instated form. This again doesn’t exclude going with your plan if that’s how the vote should go. However, from what I read from these two paragraphs that when the Foundation is reinstated due to the proper paperwork being filed, that you would no longer want to be involved at that point?

Also, if what Grant said is correct - that the Foundation is basically stuck with developers and just developers as voting members, then it will be very hard to fix the user/developer disconnect in the Gentoo community via the Foundation as it currently exists.

I’ve personally stated that if someone comes up with something that has technical merit as far as things that can improve gentoo, and steps that can be taken such as the guest post below that I’m more then willing to look and work on idea’s that Users have. I don’t consider “Bring daniel back” as a technically valid reason for his return as president. If you could point out that he has had experience running a few llc’s for example that is a very valid point for leadership of a Not for Profit business.

Again however I see a pushing of items that you were directly related to as being something that you had no part in. Many of the developers who became such were users who submitted patches and people got sick of doing commits for them were given access. This was a model that was implemented during your time as the leader of the project prior to 2004 and grew into pretty much what we see today.

I’m glad to see that we all want to have a tighter integration of the user and developer communities and that everyone has a strong passion for the project. We just need to figure out the technical ways to achieve this integration. That ultimately means this project is not dying because people care about it.