news
Don't dare call corporate/state strategy a conspiracy - NO MORE!
As of a couple of years ago I was forced to abandon the Gentoo project after I and many others were forcefully expelled by the current people that seized control over the political portion of the project and booted out everyone that didn’t want to play ball with their agenda. They have used very underhanded tactics to take over the project and most of them work for the usual tech companies talked about here in most posts (Red Hat, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the various organizations pretending to be “free” like FreeDesktop and the Linux Foundation). The very first thing they did was change the way voting works to give themselves lifetime positions within the political part of the project so they could never be removed from power. Once they managed to do that they started banning long time contributors through the usual method these days (The “Code of Conduct” they rammed through with a vote) and censoring people on the forums. They then started to highly censor most Gentoo user’s only source of contact with the project. Which is the web based support forum. While openly bragging on the mailing lists how they were banning users they didn’t like and even deleting entire forums for being too “off topic” and “a bad look” for the project. When said forum had existed for over two decades at that point.
The real reason they deleted that forum: They had spent the last year or so pushing discussion of things like systemd’s scope creep (among others) out of the regular support/topical forums for causing “flame wars” and being “off topic”. Once they’d managed to do that and move all discussion about using custom overlays to avoid the “Fedora built from source” version of Gentoo that is all of the modern profiles (including the OpenRC profiles) they deleted the entire forum. Using a couple of topics about things like US politics (e.g. Donald Trump) as the excuse. They claimed no one wanted to moderate it and the current moderation wasn’t enforcing their new Code of Conduct. When said forum moderators had attempted to reach out multiple times on the mailing lists and through forum PMs while getting totally ignored by this (for lack of a better word) cabal.