Gentoopia
I just read tsunam’s blogpost and it sparked a thought. He’s calling for more ideas for improving user relationships and quite neatly describes the Gentoo community through parallels to George Orwell’s 1984. Now, as the topic says, I’ve always regarded it as a Gentoopia. A hither unknown phenomenon to most people perhaps. I like to think I just invented it. But it’s pretty much like a cockaigne where knowledge is really abundant. You also don’t have to work too much to get it and you have loads and loads and loads of freedom.
That’s what Gentoo does best in a nutshell IMO. My bet is that it’s better to be really great with a few things than to be mediocre with many. Since the recent debate in the community on the subject ignited by the famous Gentoo founder drobbins. The community has come a long way and a lot has been done right. What I’m particularly fond of that have been brought to my attention in the wake of this are the descriptions of the emacs team” in the newsletter or the description of how the gentoo kernel team maintenance works. These are nuggets. I think they bolster the best Gentoo qualities. Lowering the thresholds to aquire knowledge. Ultimately perhaps embracing the users to the degree that they too end up living in gentoopia (becoming a dev). As spyderous shows, this also helps the community the most; by making the developer population grow even more (if I’m right that is :-)