First of all, welcome everybody – and thanks for your welcome to a new dev.
I was going to write something about the commotion in the dev community, but then I figured it’s not much use. We need to sort things out, and there is little need to comment on that.
What I would like to talk about is making things better. Change is an integral and unavoidable part of life. It’s natural that some people turn away from a project and new people join. Those come with new ideas, and, over time, the global goal may shift and change. It’s not something that comes from above, but evolves from the inside. At least when there’s no big boss sitting on a high chair.
Things that don’t change usually don’t live. There are some notable exceptions, but the general rule is, you better change if you want to live. Even if it sucks, what it often enough does. I can’t imagine how many times I wished that somebody would just stop. But they won’t, and if you don’t move, they’ll wash you away sooner or later.
So why am I wallowing in all this oh so great wisdom? We’re not going to solve any of the world’s problems. We have lots of great developers dedicating enormous amounts of time to the project. We have a great user community that is recognized for being helpful and friendly. So what’s the problem? What do we need to make better?
I think we need to take a step back. What I heard a couple of times now is “I don’t wont to spend time on that *** crap, I simply want … to develop”. I also heard a lot of “We should do …”.
Once principle of an effective project is to let everybody do what he/she is best at and only enforce a minimum of behavioral and communication standards. You better live with the various types of people you have instead of trying to change them (there we are again) since they can only do that on their own.
Today I was talking about PR and raised the question “How do we define Gentoo?” That may sound like one of those esoteric things nobody cares about, and I don’t expect anybody to care about it. But from my p.o.v. it’s interesting. Can we actually promote Gentoo? Since we are “The Meta Distribution”, is there a common base? Enterprise stability freaks, tech fans, gadget lovers, ricers, we got them all – users and devs. On what common ground can we present ourselves to the world?
Now, if I follow my own words the answer is clear: let everybody do his/her “job”, dead simple. There are people who see fit to promote Gentoo. But can we just let them? Would you – as a developer or a user – trust those people to represent you in any way? A handful of people to funnel what hundreds of dedicated people are all about? In an enterprise setting, this is not a question. The management has a “vision” (ehrm … sometimes … as blurred as it might be), and that’s it. We, on the other hand, don’t have a management, which is probably why we have any developers at all .-)
Still, I sincerely think all we need is some glue to keep all those brilliant people together. This will sound like a very bad idea to some of you, since it might resemble some kind of “elite”, “structure” or “authority”. But I am not thinking about authority. I am thinking about a common agreement that (mostly) everybody can live with, that will have to be refined constantly(!), but will, in it’s respective form, be transported to the world without interruption from individuals. This sounds stupidly theoretic, but if you think about it for 30 seconds, you’ll see that all the tools are there. We just need to use them accordingly. And then let everybody to what they do best. And stop worrying.