Andrew’s ashamed of his score…. me? I must be a down right failure… I got a 61!!!!! Some of the questions were rigged and were off set by the fact that I’m visiting my parents right now.
And I again hit a huge area where I should have been blogging but wasn’t. Oh well.. Hope to blog some more.
First off I’d like to say thanks for taking the time to read everyone’s nominations and all the mailing list stuff and taking the time to read my platform. I think everyone sees this as an important part of Gentoo.
Here are the major points that I feel the Foundation needs to work towards.
Copyright assignment from Gentoo Technologies, Inc.
Realistically, Gentoo Foundation has nothing without these assets. These are Gentoo’s strongest assets, our name and brand. We need to complete and finalize this work to be able to turn to a new chapter in Gentoo’s life. How many times have we heard of projects being held back because of this. This is completely unacceptable. I’m willing to drive out to Daniel’s home town and sit there with him until this situation gets hashed out because at the rate it’s going, who knows if it will ever happen. In fact there are many programs in my school from the college of business and college of law that allow students to intern at a business and provide their experience and gain some knowledge first hand. I guarantee you that I could dig up some experienced law students as well as law professors to dig into any situations we might have run into. While they are not “paid” legal advice, I’m sure we can have “paid” legal advise donated on a pro-bono effort if we tried.
Openness
We are an open-sourced project so likewise the Foundation should be open about it’s policies, meetings and decisions. Meetings need to be regular and recorded properly. They should also be available for any developer or user to review. In certain circumstances I can understand restricting this info to developers only, like the -core listserv. But we should never keep anything secret from our developers.
The Gentoo Store
This is a thorn in our sides that needs to be resolved. The Store needs to come under strict Foundation control rather then Daniel’s control. All proceeds need to go to the Foundation, like the current store promises. In addition, we need to continue to work on our tax exemption status rather then being for profit. We are missing out on a crucial source of donations without this status. Donations that can provide Gentoo with much needed hardware and support.
Facilitate the Development of Gentoo
How you might ask? First off, we need to work and setting in place proper developer agreements between any and all devs that require them because of their country’s copyright laws. While I myself am an American and thus unfamiliar with other country’s copyright laws. We should work with each developer and discover the copyright requirements in each of those countries and then work on an appropriate developer agreement. Why? First and foremost prime reason is that we are about to lose the entire Gentoo Kernel because of developer agreement issues. This needs to be hashed out immediately to allow infra to store this vital part of Gentoo on our networks.
As the Foundation is the financial arm of Gentoo, it needs to exercise itself as such. The Foundation needs to be the arm of Gentoo that bridges the gap between the “Corporate World” and provide the financial resources necessary for the advancement of Gentoo. Whether this is through additional bandwidth/mirrors or hardware for testing. This is a must. In addition to this, the Foundation can leverage it’s arm to work on paid Gentoo developers. Which is an entire field that can be explored later.
Gentoo Promotion
The Foundation should be the chief face of Gentoo providing clear and concise PR material.
Project Maintainership
The Foundation should ensure that the projects we choose to pursue are staffed and projects that are not properly organized and thought out do not leave the drawing board. This will help Gentoo credibility in the world with the Foundation being the single official PR channel. Rather then each dev announcing a project to the world and that project never producing.
Continual Improvement w/ the User Community
The Foundation should work towards continually improving the relations with the user community.
About Me
I am 23 now (day after my birthday) and am still a student at the University of Florida studying Computer Engineering. I will be completing this shortly and hopefully will be entering the Air Force in 2007 as a 2nd Lt. I have been a Gentoo developer since 2002 with a bit of a hiatus away from Gentoo in between there. I am primarily responsible for certain packages in the mobile herd and for MythTV and it’s cronies. I am also the loudmouth behind the Gentoo adaptation of Project Utopia, which has goals of a Gentoo desktop experience that just works. I know I might have been MIA lately, but I had 18 credit hours and a senior project to work on this past semester. Then as soon as my semester ended, my laptop died and I was without a computer for nearly 30 days. But now that I’m back I’m hitting everything hard and with a passion.
My personal finances are also vested in Gentoo as I am currently working on a startup locally to provide Gentoo system and support to businesses and am working on a sizable client. Part of my plan, once I can get the startup to be on its own feet, rather then sucking out of my wallet monthly, is to provide a constant financial contribution to Gentoo directly. However I would really need this to be tax exempt, so my goals for tax exception status maybe a little self serving.
Comments
I encourage comments and criticisms as well as support. This helps me learn better what we all need as a community rather then just my interpretations because after all, Foundation members are here to serve the developer body and the user base.
Well as a follow on to yesterday’s post. I’ve talked to npmcallum and then with genstef about dbus & hal stuff and we’ve decided to create Project Gentopia. Which will basically be the support group for anything and everything dbus and hal related.
Project Utopia is the name for the aggregation and integration of a number of projects centrered on autodetecting and autoloading drivers for computer hardware (particulary hot-swappable hardware such as USB and IEEE 1394 (aka. “Firewire”) devices).
More info from a kerneltrap post written by Robert Love.
Filed under: General, Gentopia, Linux
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Let me give my two cents on the spin of the mobile herd’s feelings towards Power Management in Gentoo. In one quick bold summary it’s cpufreqd is teh 0wnage. All the other apps out there can just line up and blow me. To put it bluntly…. And here’s why.
Who knows how to suspend their laptops now days… I sure as fuck don’t…
Last I heard you had to use the last one to get a proper suspend, but after manually dropping to command line to kill a few apps and rm some modules.
ACPI? APM? Who the hell knows… and really I DON’T CARE. Just make it freaking work!
Which one is it? I don’t have a clue. So.. let me jump on the FreeDesktop.org bandwagon and use some of their stuff to solve this problem. I’m talking about the goodness of HAL or Hardware Abstraction Layer. The latest versions now support ACPI/APM/PMU/UPS stuff completely abstractly. And some one got smart enough to write a nice app on top of it called Gnome Power Manager oddly enough. To top it off, he says he’s borrowed from my fellow Orange and Blue buddy Robert Love so it’s got a good code base to start from.
But here’s what’s the problem with power management in Linux. Every freaking fool with gcc and a laptop has written their own suspend system or CPU frequency monitor or battery status. They’re all incomplete and unmaintained and have made it into Portage and they need to go. Be prepared if you use some crap ass program to handle any of these functions. IT WILL BE DELETED. And just for good measure I’ll dd if=/dev/zero of=/those/damn/crappy/programs so you can’t possibly get them back ever again. WHY!? Because we all need to take a controlled effort and raise the functionality level of Linux.
Now the next thing I’d like to see is a swsusp2 + gentoo-sources kernel. But oh well.
For those of you interested in dbus 0.33 and hal 0.5.1. They are available at those bugs as well as my Portage Overlay.
ferringb wanted me to add that LD_PRELOAD segfaults suck ass… No idea why… but hey… he’s special.. He has to be to work with Portage code.
Filed under: General, Linux
8 Comments
I’m just posting this to say I just got my SSH keys back and I’m ready to go in full swing and start crunching back those bugs. Unfortunately right now I have to head to work, but as soon as I get back there’s a bunch of bugs I’ll be closing.
On another note, I’d like to nominate myself for a Gentoo Trustee position, tomorrow I’ll be blogging about my platform and why I am a good candidate for the job.
Filed under: General, Linux
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