Mindless Techie

Hmm… So the site was down for about a week while I waited for a paycheck to pay the server bill. Jeez, paying bills just sucks.

You know, the more I look at this site, the more I don’t like the look of it. A while back, I thought this was a nice template to use for the site, but now it just looks cluttered and very disorganized.

All I have to do now is find some free time to get things looking better.

There’s a wiki article that attempts to consolidate and explain a lot of the information found on the forums about the current status of various things at Gentoo.  If you haven’t yet, take a look at it and contribute.

For those of you whom haven’t subscribed to the gentoo-nfp mailing list, Alec Warner (aka antarus) just sent an informative email that explains a little more about what is going on with the foundation status. He also requests for suggestions on how to proceed regarding the foundation status.

There are a number of folks working on this issue; this thread is an
attempt to move conversations off of gentoo-core (internal only) and
onto gentoo-ftp (a more public list).

Renat is currently working on getting our expired New Mexico filings
so he can show them to some lawyers he knows in order to get some
recent advice on how we could proceed.

See [1] for more info.

There has been talk internally about whether accepting Daniel’s offer
is a good idea. I think the only conclusion we can really draw at
this point is that the timeframe alloted is currently too short to
make a good choice in the matter. Some people want to vote, others
want more details regarding Daniel’s plans, etc.

I believe there are a group of folks working to formulate the
necessary communique to Daniel to get their concerns addressed (I’m
not going to list them here or leak the contents of the request but I
will say it is going on).

A number of folks have volunteered to get the Foundation back in order
should Daniel not grant a time extension or should the existing
Trustees reject his request.

I want to try to make the point of this thread clear; I’m trying to
keep the general community informed about the internal progress of
what is going on. I’d appreciate useful feedback about how we could
proceed on the matter.

The intention of this list is to be about the non-profit foundation;
if you have problems with the distribution itself or other technical
matters, please direct them to gentoo-dev or gentoo-project.

Thanks,

-Alec

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205905

There’s a poll in the Gentoo forums regarding Daniel Robbins offer today to help get Gentoo Linux back on it’s feet. Gentoo is in serious need of a leader that is not afraid to take action. Please follow the link and vote yes.

read more | digg story

I just saw that Daniel posted an offer to help Gentoo in it’s time of need.  I really hope that the trustees and council agree and choose to help.

Finally, some news on the dev list about the GWN.  You need to read through quite a few posts to get the whole story.

Wolf31o2 sparked the conversation with a rather grim update on the GWN status and why he hasn’t put any time into the GWN lately.

The GWN is currently in a permanent state of hiatus. I have nointentions on spending another minute working on the GWN. While many,many improvements have been made in the processes for getting theautomated data, getting articles has been pulling teeth, at best. Thiswas taking me upwards of 12 hours a week, which was impacting the time Ihad available to work on things like releases and my day job. As such,the GWN is abandoned and will likely stay that way until someone stepsup and decides they’re ready and willing to give up their lives to workon this publication. Yes, I think switching to a monthly newsletterwould *help* the problem, but it still won’t resolve it. The GWN needsarticles more than anything, and few people are submitting anything.

I certainly agree and understand his frustration.  Getting users to submit articles is difficult at best. The average Gentoo user doesn’t seem too interested in spending time creating and submitting articles to the GWN.

There were several replies from various dev’s offering to submit information at least on a monthly basis.  Anant volunteered to get the project back on track if the GWN becomes a monthly newsletter (GMN).  He says he’s willing to put 12-15 hours/month on the project.  I don’t think he realizes that it will probably take a lot more time than that to do things properly.

I’m glad someone stepped forward; however, I still think there are many problems that need to be addressed.

• Lack of articles.  We still need to find a way to get Gentoo users excited enough about the distribution to volunteer a little bit of time and submit some stories.
• The entire GWN team needs to revived.  A roll call needs to be done to find out who is still willing to volunteer time on the project and what specifically they are willing to do.  It’s fine to hope that some content comes in from random users, but there has to be at least a few people who have dedicated some time to rounding up fresh information and articles.
• Don’t start calling it GMN.  Heck, why is there even a need to commit to a monthly release?  Why not just release a new GWN when it’s ready.  Sometimes that could be a week or two between releases, or maybe six weeks.  That’s why I really like the idea of changing the name to Gentoo World News and keeping the GWN acronym.  The name doesn’t commit the publication to a release schedule.

I have a lot more to say on the subject, but I’m running short on time, so I guess I’ll stop rambling on now. 

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