On Tuesday 10 October 2006 03:45, Kari Hazzard wrote: > On Monday 09 October 2006 6:30 pm, Alec Warner wrote: > > I concur with Donnie here; Gentoo exists not because of Users, but > > because of (a subset of active) Developers. It isn't a statement that > > is meant to trash users (because you are quite helpful in many > > instances). But the naive thought that Gentoo revolves around users > > is....well, naive. Gentoo was here before there were thousands of > > users, in the unlikely event that you all switch distros, Gentoo will > > probably still be here. > > It will not, however, have anywhere near as many developers, nor will it > have more than a fraction of the resources now available to it. Users are > the reason people sponsor Gentoo, users are the reason people know Gentoo > exists, whether you realise it or not.
You miss the point entirely. Unpaid software authors do it because they want to use the software themselves. Those authors that publish their source generally do so because they see it as an overall waste of time for the proverbial wheel to be reinvented by others. I'd say they also do it because they are happy in the thought that 9 times out of 10 they'll find some other author has published source to achieve a new goal of their own saving them from having to reinvent the wheel themselves. So how does this fit in with sponsors and volumnuous resources? Well, it doesn't. But then, it was never meant to. So called "end users" that don't give back to the project (giving resources is a way of giving back, by the way) make of more than 99% of those that utilize the resources provided by sponsors. Sponsoring is essentially payed advertising that wasn't done with dollars (or yen, etc) and has a generally high risk return. If referring to the "sponsor a dev" program, it's still a similar give-take scenario. It either falls into the above scenario (that is, a lesser funded dev needs highly supported hardware to continue his regular work, gets it and blogs about it) or it falls into the category of poorly supported hardware - or both categories. In the case of the latter category, the dev is likely just looking for the learning experience when taking the hardware and building up support for it. It's all about win-win situations. I don't know what the original post was about. I only read this one because "I concur with Donnie here" caught my eye. But whatever was being asked for in the original post (I'm assuming that this sub-thread started with somebody asking for something?), would the dev get anything back for satisfying the request other than a less stressful time perusing their inbox? > > To make another argument; if I go buy a RHEL3 box set and then complain > > because the liveCD doesn't have some key programs (lets say > > cryptsetup-luks statically compiled so I can boot off of a USB key and > > encrypt my / partition), is the onus on them to release a new CD just > > for me? Hell I'm a paying customer! But they don't care. > > Well, that's simply bad customer service. > > Don't constrict your support organ because someone else's support organ > operates poorly. That doesn't help anyone, not users, not devs. The initial premise for Alec's argument above is just wrong as when you go out and buy a RHEL3 box set you're not actually buying the software contained within. What you're buying is a set of installation CDs and an X month/year support contract. When you purchase Gentoo CDs, you're buying a set of installation CDs only. When you're downloading Gentoo, you're not purchasing anything. I'll try to answer your response to his invalid point, though. Whichever product you buy, the licenses for the software contained therein almost never place any requirements on the licenser, rather only on the licensee. This is true even when it comes to Microsoft, Apple, etc. If you actually go and read most of the commercial licenses, it boils down to "This software is provided AS IS - except that you can't make copies, resell, use on more than one computer or by more than one person, etc." > In any event, when was the decision made to kill the Universal LiveCD for > x86 and replace it with the installer? I'd like to read the discussion. I have a feeling the discussion took place about 18 months ago on -core, but I'm not sure as to the answer to this. -- Jason Stubbs -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
