In Making the Distribution, a series of three developerworks articles, Daniel Robbins talks about the circumstances in which he left Stampede Linux, to found his own speed-optimized Linux distribution we all know now as Gentoo.
Beware of the one-sided view of this article : Daniel Robbins did leave the Stampede project because of severe tensions with other Stampede collaborators. The same thing seems to happen in Gentoo too : Daniel left the project in 2004 for personal reasons. He officially re-joined the Gentoo development team two weeks ago - only to resign a few days later. The reason? Strong personal attacks by some of the current developers of the project. Distrowatch even claims that Gentoo is dying.