jdhore1

Nope. Working that "low-level" kind of scares me.

I personally find it something fun to do in my free time, I can't really speak for any other open-source developers, however I do know that some Gentoo developers spend so much time working on the project because it has large tie-ins to what they do at work.

What parts of Gentoo do you develop/maintain? What would you say is the key that differentiates Gentoo from other Linux distros?

I develop/maintain the mozilla *-bin packages (firefox-bin, seamonkey-bin, thunderbird-bin), audacious media player, pike, pkgconf, miro, the_silver_searcher (a GREAT ack or grep replacement) and other miscellaneous stuff. I'm also a member of the pr team and the x86 team.

The key difference of Gentoo compared to other distros is really the customizability you get from Gentoo being a source-based distro. You can choose your package versions, you can choose your package options and (this is sort of the annoying thing, being a Gentoo developer) no 2 Gentoo systems are identical (unless of course you specifically set systems up to be identical).

It's more easily customizable and flexible than any other distro.

I'm not tempted by "sexier" projects simply because I don't PARTICULARLY like any of them. Mozilla's stuff is not very good, Webkit is not very good, Android is not very good, but they're all simply the best we have at the moment. That doesn't give me good hope. In my personal opinion, Gentoo is the best distro out there for advanced linux users and i can't think of really anything anyone could do to drastically improve it, so I was happy to contribute.

Users are rarely grateful, but i'm OK with that. They do understand what i do when i spend 2 seconds explaining what I actually do in Gentoo.