I’ll admit I’ve quite enjoyed hulu for watching tv series when I want to. It doesn’t cover everything I want to watch but its a start.

Some of the things I want to watch are provided by Discovery, and of course their web based video player is only for windows and mac os x. I might be way off base but I’d say that the average linux user is probably the same exact that would fit in their demographic. So I decided to write to them and say exactly that. Response I got was of course a standard form factor reply:

Thank you for your interest in the Move Media player. We do not offer support
for any distribution of the Linux kernel. Supported operating systems include
Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Mac OS X 10.3+.

As well, netflix has the same exact issue. Why is it that these companies who are quite large can’t seem to manage to find a way to support anyone who would want to make use of services they provide.

In a very large stretch or not depending on how you look at things. Its almost a form of segregation. Windows users away from those of alternative platforms. Obviously Hulu is able to support anyone with a very simple design and I’m sure many unix users, myself included make use of it.

So here’s hoping that this will get other people writing about it and get some change within these large companies to get rid of archaic browser/os based platform tools.

I’m going to do a bit of clarification as there’s a lot of people who I’ve seen replied that don’t get truly what we are talking about here. Surprisingly so actually. As it stands there are two separate divisions in Gentoo Linux, have been for 2-3 years when daniel stepped down/forced down depending on who you talk to. I’ve created a handy little graphic for you

As you can see in the above graph. Gentoo is divided into two distinct sides. Technical which everyone is worried about has almost nothing to do with this. Its only affected by the fact that Daniel could tell us today that we no longer can use Gentoo (new name time) or the G logo (new logo time). He has not done this in the 2-3 years that he’s still held onto these copyrights when we should of been properly incorporated as a foundation and had the transfer that he wanted to happen actually happen.

If you notice…ebuilds will still be here..developers will still be doing portage updates, things will continue on. This is not a death of gentoo technical..nor in anyway relates to them other then a possible name. Now assuming you got that can we please avoid the “we need to give gentoo back to daniel because the trustee’s failed and that means gentoo as a whole failed and its dying. Its simply not…we just have someone who’s very kindly allowing us silently to use his copyrights but at any time he’s able to tell us that we can’t use it anymore and would be changing all the materials that he holds copyright over. Everything that you as a user or a developer would use would be the same…just instead of Gentoo, you’d be using (We_lost_our_name_distro).

Now as far as daniels post, please excuse the bit of sarcasm involved but here is another graph that shows his plan.

As you see this plan brings the Foundation and the Council under the same umbrella. With Daniel as the head of the organization electing the other trustee’s who will oversee both the technical direction as well as the financial/legal aspects…which as I mentioned previously is very hard to find in anyone who would be able to be elected. If you talk to Mike(vapier) for instance. He has no desire to deal with the “foundation” aspects but has done very well as a member of the Council. Diego (flameeyes) I have no doubt would say the same thing. He’d much rather be coding and working to improve Gentoo then having to deal with the potential…oh this person wants to be reimbursed for printing up a banner for the Germany linux symposium that we were represented at.

Now please note that it is a lot of sarcasm in that picture with the “yes men/women” but I’m fairly certain that while Daniel has good intentions at heart, he’d elect/select people who generally agree with his point’s but not be the best for the role. While I don’t follow the Councils actions much, I see them actually making progress. Which you can actually see here in the logs and summary of the meetings. If you want to talk about transparency, there you go meetings are actually posted with what was discussed in both raw and summary format.

Daniel,

We’ve talked before about the trustee’s and the foundation before and I know you’ve been in contact with some fairly recently about the situation that the Foundation is in nonexistence. What you are doing is both good and bad. Let me explain….

Its good because you still care about the existence of the organization but in your vision its your way or the highway. That is in part really what the open source moment has as its benefit and downfall. It drives people to both strive harder..but also to fork because to quote some people “that bloke is a real arse and I won’t work with him”. Even returning in a “part time” role would be a disaster after all. I don’t think many have forgotten what happened with the last time you rejoined. That lasted all of about 2 days. There are many reasons for this but I don’t personally see your “open and free” as that in any true sense of the words. If you look you would probably agree with me. As I know there would be a few that you would want to silence immediately as the so called troublemakers for the project. However, they’ve also pushed and help direct portage to have standards that did not exist before that allowed interoperability with not one other, but two other package managers. If under your system…would this of happened, or would these yes…abrasive people of been silenced to not contribute to what makes Gentoo in part what the website says at it heart? The ability to make your own distribution.

We also know that you don’t have to give this chance at all, as you still own the rights to many aspects of what make Gentoo itself and could willingly and forcefully take it if you really wanted to. You’ve not chosen to do that but have in essence issued an ultimatum.

Now onto your points.

1) no disagreement

2)The Foundation will be responsible for providing general guidance and direction for the project and for ensuring that the Gentoo project is moving in a positive direction and has proper leadership.

This is something we like to call the council. There was a reason for the separation of the guidance of the project direction from the legal issues, of which you were at one point agreeable with. They are as you are aware entirely polar opposite sides of the spectrum. You by no means need to be a good developer (write code, maintain 20 packages) to be a good trustee. You do however need to know how Gentoo works, to make sound technical decisions about the direction the project should go and if something is even physically/theoretically possible.

Very seldom do you have a person who is excellent at one, but to have someone who excels at both aspects is far harder to find…as by the fact that as a whole, we’ve been immured with doubts about the ability to make the right decisions about how and where to go. As well as we got momentum another possibility would come along and we’d start all over as it was a “better options”. That is a failing on our part, one that really has cost us far more then anything else in a real sense then any personal orideological issue that we’ve fought over and had been reported to the media.

I can continue on with reasons if you’d like about why the separation from the direction of the technical aspect from the legal is good. I could always mention any decent sized company has legal departments, the board of directors doesn’t do legal and direction the company takes…just checks with the lawyers typically to make sure its A-OK.

3) The Foundation will be responsible for ensuring that Gentoo developers, individual Gentoo users, external Gentoo-related projects and Gentoo-using organizations have a voice and the opportunity to influence the overall technical direction of the Gentoo project in a clear, open and organized way.

We actually have that to an extent now. It just so happens that our more persistent users are or were former developers and as such their voice tends to carry a bit more weight..and they have effected some very solid changes in the way things happen. However, I’m all ears about the grandiose ways in which you have that will give a larger opportunity to the users to decide on matters? Certainly we could expand on the ways in which a user can get directly involved as that’s always been an issue that we’ve had…and correct me if I’m wrong….but I’d say we’re larger then when you left. Its very much like hearing the voices of a million people screaming out and all saying something different. So how do you pick the voice out from the million of voices?

My opinion, Gentoo needs to provide the tools as stated earlier to make your own distro…it has that in ways with catalyst and there’s work going in there for quite a long time to improve it (thanks go to wolf31o2 for this one). We’ve been for as long as I’ve been a member (as a user I’m implying which has been over 5 years now) more in a maintenance mode for the packages themselves. While the tree has grown in packages it’s still something that is a day to day maintenance and isn’t where the “innovation is”. However, that’s one of the major things with becoming a developer…maintain ebuilds. That’s how we recruit..that’s how since I’ve been a user the major way to “help” was to be good enough to maintain ebuilds and code..but only so much as to fix what you maintained…or worked on portage.

Now as well the above is a lofty dream as my skills are bash, sh, some php/python/perl so I can’t bring about the changes and with everyone mostly tied up in package maintaining…those who could would probably not want to, or even if they do…where’s the time after maintaining the packages that you took on as a good gentoo developer.

So please…I’d like to hear how you can direct a beast with 9 different heads all going in different directions…I pointed out two.Maintainer-ship of ebuilds and catalyst for building your own distro’s can all be led to one spot?

4) Legal paperwork will be filed properly and on-time and the Foundation will maintain a proper level of transparency with the community.

This is as I mentioned before a failing of our end. No excuses can be made for that and there’s a lot to prove on that end as it was an entire wash.

5) The Foundation will help the Gentoo community to be a positive and pleasant environment for all participants.

Who defines what is a positive and pleasant environment? It’s been tried a few ways and they’ve had various levels of success. Some are greater failures then others but they were attempts. I’m sure a few people would say that I don’t contribute to a positive and pleasant environment…so should I go? Or how about Ciaranm who many people dislike but while he’s disliked you can’t say that he hasn’t as a user contributed to many improvements to gentoo as a basis, and created/leads a very popular alternative to portage/emerge that is feature compatible with emerge, and extends functionality. Should he be banned because of personality differences?

What you are talking about really is two different things here as I see it. 1) everyone needs to be flowery and we need to be communal and 2) its my way or the highway

1) For this how do you expect to be fair and just to everyone? You simply can’t and to be truly open as you so wish to be…we need to let every voice be heard..just like in a communal environment. Guess what, very few communal area’s lived to this day because we’re all people and we fail as people. Sure you can go and hand everyone out something special to smoke to mellow them out but that doesn’t fix the issue at all.

2)You’re not a benevolent dictator….nor can anyone be one

It’s great to dream, but those who dream never set foot in reality of what the situation is right now. You dream of what gentoo can become and what it was….the reality is that we are not a legal entity in any sense of the word and have no true right to the “Gentoo” anything at this point, its by your good graces that we’re even allowed to use the name at all….for that we are all thankful but in the openness you want…I say no to you being the benevolent semi-parttime dictator with minions who will follow your orders as if they are the word of god.

Its been a crazy month for me… but I am getting into a flow with it. Mostly the crazyness has been caused by work, which I have to say I’m really enjoying and feel like I’m able to bring a lot of the skills I’ve acquired to use everyday. As a continuation of that little bit of crazyness, I’m going to Germany for business. Doesn’t this sound familar? I’ll be there from Monday til Friday. So I’ll be semi MIA during that time.

With Gentoo, my production has dropped in most regards however I’m still active and responding to queries and helping people out that way. X86 continues to plug along working quite well as a team. Probably the most success I’d have to say I’ve personally had in Gentoo. This is due in large part to the Arch Tester program, who it seems to turn out some of the better developers as far as just getting stuff done goes. Many of which have remained on the x86 team after becoming full developers. A few remain arch testers and that’s as far as they want to go and its great to have them as the ranks shrink when we have one become a developer.

Lately, I’ve seen quite a few people come to me asking about joining the x86 team and marking stuff stable. Its a nice sign that people want to join the project/group. With a solid core it continues to in my biased opinion be one of the best archs for stability in the general. Its been a long road but one that I think everyone has received benefit from it. Although, I don’t visit the forums much but I remember when I first joined as a developer. Stable was more or less a joke. There were so many threads about it breaking. Now I at least hope there are few and those are far between. Its one of the things that I can hold onto as a positive influence that I’ve been part of in the organization as a whole.

See everyone in a week.

Well its that time of the year again where everyone tries to come up with great ideas for things to implement into their open source projects. Again Gentoo has been graciously accepted by Google to be a mentoring organization to get people involved in Open Source Projects. Google I give a lot of credit for giving money to get people involved in the movement, even if it helps them as well.

However, I’m disappointed in Gentoo again. One of the proposals is for a project that is not part of the Gentoo sphere. That one being Paludis. Yes its in the tree, but so is gnome. So should we be doing something for Gnome because its in there? No, that’s not something that is going to help us. The java related ones are different as they are improving a large portion of how an entire section is handled. Its clearly depend what its goal is and how to obtain it. I give credit to the java team for coming up with clear concise objectives…if albeit it maybe not the most realistic for a student to get done. Another that I’m actually looking forward to seeing is the LVM integration into the installer. That’s one that has real benefits for a ton of users, as LVM allows you to grow and shrink your filesystem so easily, while trying that with the actual file system utils can be impossible at times.

I don’t know..I just think it’d be better if we focused on Gentoo official projects then something that is associated with Gentoo because it works with the ebuilds..and some Gentoo developers work on it. Blehness…..

Scale was heck of a good time, as others have talked about.

It actually started for me in the elevator up to my room the first night. Where I ran into Josh and his wife Melanie. They got onto the elevator after me, and Josh looked at me..and said “You’re Joshua arn’t you”. I looked over and said yes, and he introduced himself and his Melanie. Which by the way the lucky boy, married a cute younger intelligent woman.
That night we met for drinks down in the bar, and pete who picked us up at the airport entirely missed that I was sitting beside him, and was too embarrassed/shy to ask if I was who he thought I was, and well…he was in a conversation that I didn’t feel like it was my place to join so that’s the first talk pete and I had. When everyone else showed up down to the bar, it started off slightly mellow. Everyone did slowly loosen up, and I’m sure one or two will say that I was quite the flirt, with both Christel, and Melanie. Who after I sat in her lap, and got off Josh got a little jealous and went over and sat on her arm rest and wrapped his arm around her. It was SOOOOOO cute, they really do make a cute couple.

Second day was filled with talk about surprise buttsex, users and general chaos as it was by far the busiest day. Omp took the lead on burning dvd’s in part probably because he was the shyest of the bunch of us and I’m sure felt a little out of place. I’m happy to report though that he did come out of his shell a bit on sunday and it was good to see him interacting really well with both the crazy dev’s talking exactly like we do in dev (it really wasn’t any different), and the users.

Users, are an interesting lot….I had 4 developers come up to me and ask if I was a package maintainer, then proceed to go on about how their package in our distro is out of date and I have to update it for them to be current. I of course give them the submit a bug or maintain it yourself and find a dev who’ll be a proxy, but that’s not good enough and all of those conversations end up the same way.

I by far had the most fun talking with the other developers, and like all of us I think our opinions of each other have changed for the better. People who I possibly thought were somewhat of an ass, are really decent good folk in person. A lot of their behavior now makes sense and we can laugh and joke about it instead of getting angry at each other. It really made me think that we should just get as many developers as we can together for a giant (blackace’s suggestion) paintball day, and shoot each other silly… Not only will the people that everyone think of as the assholes get shot a lot…and I would expect a lot, but you’d be able to go why the heck and talk it out in person. People might even begin to change.

That night we went out to a Thai place where half the people got lost by following their gps maps. After that there was a group that went to buy a bottle of vodka, which was then promptly consumed. Including when the rest of the party arrived, I got a paper cup from christel that had more then 3 shots in it..I’d say 4 actually, and it was good enough that it actually started to eat through the paper cup mixer I had. It also resulted in a contest between the tipsy christel and myself to see who could finish first, with an unclaimed bet of undisclosed terms. Again that night I didn’t sleep much and disappeared to try and get water into christel and her two roommates so that they didn’t wake up with massive hangovers.

Sunday was slow and got to talk with Melanie for a few hours and hear about herself, and Josh, how they met got together and it was just a really cute story. I kept her from grading the homework she brought though for three hours though which was a bit of a =/. Followed by the last meal together and sad goodbyes.

Also, christel and I discussed a going away gift for josh and melanie, and actually on sunday I asked how she’d of taken it. As was mentioned earlier about buttsex, christel and I came up with the hilarious idea of getting her a strapon, just for suck a purpose. She when I asked her about it….laughed about it and told me that it wasn’t the strangest thing to happen at her bachelorette party. She said josh would laugh about it as well..but we didn’t actually do it…should of but didn’t? Just figured everyone would laugh about it.
For being very nervous about going, it ended being a really memorable time, with quite a few interesting situations and memories…some probably scarring ones as well.

I’m sure most people went oooh I want that phone after it was announced as its pretty rocking from the pictures etc that have been shown so far. However, how many people had their first though be…I’d love to put linux on that thing.

Yes…I did that as my first thought after it was announced that it had 4 or 8gb of space on it.

Oh and showing my mother it…she now has technolust for the device, and she’s not good with a phone at all. I think that just sealed the deal for apple bringing the new next thing in phones.

Well, I survived the company Christmas party last night, along with everyone else who was at the little table. Reports came in that a few of us felt a bit quezy and ben’s girlfriend did a bit more then just feel quezy. Oddly enough she was the instigator of quite a bit of the drinking so I guess it was just the social nature and good time that we were having that got us to drink more then any of us normally would. It however was probably one of the funnest night’s I’ve had out in a while, as its a small company so we all actually get along quite well.

As far as the trips go, here’s a question. I landed in Tokyo for about an hour or two so should I add it to countries I visited, as I never left the airport.

Growth, well that’s an interesting topic that I’ve been thinking of for a day or two for a couple of reasons. One is the recent departure of Jeremy Allison from Novell over the Microsoft deal. Many people have been giving him a lot of credit over it, but I think most are missing a major thing about it. This is a gentleman who has decided that what he stands for and believes is worth more to him then a job where he was no doubt fairly well paid. He’s done something that I think most of us would not have the courage to do.

He’s taken the step into something uncertain, assuming he doesn’t have another job lined up when he did this…which would then make most of the high and lofty ideal’s mute. I’m sure he won’t find a problem finding another job but its interesting to see individuals taking a stand against business’s and the practices that they do that as an individual you know is wrong. It’d be nice to see more of this happening and have it actually cause business’s to change how they actually do business. Now even in his own statements, Jeremy said he is a minor part of the group so his actions, won’t unfortunately have an effect on the company in the long run. I just wonder that if I was in a similar situation if I’d quit over it, or bite the bullet, work and continue to protest from within the company.
This article sponsored by Alcohol, “Making the normal look hot, since prohibition”

Well the trustees have been a busy bunch lately. This is a great thing as there are many things that this new group of five will need to get done.

Renat had a meeting with the lawyers to flesh out the next steps for the Foundation. I’d like to personally thank our counsel once again for helping us with this process as it’s very much a first for us, not to mention good practice for Renat as this is some of what he seems to eventually want to do with his degree.
The things we all already know about:

1) Clarify and approve bylaws;

2) File paperwork for incorporation after figuring out where is best. Delaware currently looks like the best spot.

3) File paperwork for tax-exempt status under 501(c)(3);

4) Transfer funds to an account that is accessible to international trustees.

These are important first steps that will allow us to assign tasks and better focus our efforts.

Well, its a bit of a sad day today in Gentoo-land  as Stuart has retired from the project. Which made me realize that most of the people that I enjoyed interacting with on the project have left. There are a few left and a few of the newer people that I chat with fairly often, however it is definitely not the same.

That is probably in part what is showing up in my lack of motivation to really work on much Gentoo related stuff currently. I’ve finished my goal of a 1000 commits in a year and I’ve just sort of been taking it easy and working slowly on stuff, when it suits me. I’m around irc as always to field questions but I’m not in a rush to get things done.

Another part of that is that I’ve been amazingly busy at work for the past two weeks and I just want to relax and unwind when I’m home. Listening to All Things Considered on the way home starts that process but it seems to take a good while longer to unwind. I will also have a 13 hour plane flight upcoming that is going to be ohhh so much fun. Remind me to register for the frequent flier miles.