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LinuxPPC Co-Founder Resigns
acaben writes "Jason Haas, co-founder of LinuxPPC (and a semi-frequent topic of discussion on Slashdot) has announced he is resigning from the company to pursue a college degree and a life a little less hectic. Haas explained he was burned out, and that "Three or four years of trying to do as much as humanly possible will do that to you." There's more information available on his depature at MacSlash."
People forget that they will be working for about 40 years of their lives (or more). If you burn out at age 25, you still have to figure out what you are going to do from now untill you want to retire or die. Unless you are one of the few who make *SO* much money by age 30 that you can raise a family and live the rest of your life off of it. You have to figure that you will need to keep working until you are 60 or 65 or so. So it makes sense to not try to work 80 hrs a week every week for the rest of your life.
Hell you might even want to take time out to have a family and maybe a hobby or two.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
That realize that playing with computers for some of us is how we pay the bills and that sometimes no mater how much money you are making working 80 hrs a week is just not worth it. (At least for some people)
Erlang Developer and podcaster
...can be found here.
Something that almost NOBODY seems to have straight is the difference between LinuxPPC the kernel and LinuxPPC the distro. I'm still a bit confused m'self. From observing, i get the vague sense that the LinuxPPC distro is just kind of tossed together by kernel developers who are much too busy maintaining the kernel to actually put together a distro, and the LPPC distro is nothing more than redhat recompiled without any testing, a thousand disparate and mostly uncessecary parts thrown together on a CD, most of which are for various reaons broken. Personally, i have used (buying one of them) multiple versions of LinuxPPC and had a simply miserable time with them all. I then went and got me a copy of Debian/PPC, which uses the LinuxPPC kernel -- which was as easy as downloading a disk image and letting dpkg handle the rest-- and my experience with it has been absolutely blissful. (I have had serious problems with the X server, i will admit, but i suspect this could easily be fixed were it not for the fact i am purposefully choosing not to run X on this machine.) I have never used Yellow Dog Linux, but everyone i've talked to who used it was quite happy with it. I personally would rather use Debian/PPC, being as i love apt-get and dselect more than i can express, but YDL may be better for people who are not (as i would consider myself now) relatively experienced linux users. I am still wonderfully grateful to the LinuxPPC project, it just seems to me the quality of their distro is not very high on their list of priorities.
If i am mistaken as to the nature of the LinuxPPC distrbution, or if the LPPC distribution has improved in quality since the times i used it (it has been awhile, relatively speaking) i wish to apologize greatly to anyone i have slandered.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Yet another case to introduce -1, Misinformative. The post is not off topic, it's not a troll, it's not a flamebait. But the information it presents is simply completely wrong, and it baffles me that somebody actually cared to mod it up.
I wouldn't want to moderate it as Overrated, either, because it would seem, to an uncareful meta-moderator, that I have some personal thing against the poster, which is really not the case.
As someone already noted, RISC means Restricted Instruction Set Computer, not restricted number of registers. Said that, I am not willing to get into the debate whether LinuxPPC is or is not a good idea, due tothe difference between CISC and RISC architectures. I'll leave that to the experts.
Sigged!
And I'm sure being in a serious car accident and almost losing your life in the middle of it all probably doesn't help.
Good luck to him in all his future ventures.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Apple even suggests using PPC linux to build beowulf clusters from G4s.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
I often wonder how people manage to continously create some of the most useful open sourced products when they are not getting paid for it. Don't get me wrong I understand life isn't all about money, but you have to sometimes look at the realities of life, and you do need money to pay your bills.
Yes - but most open source developers have normal paying jobs providing their income. The development of a lot of the software you see on Sourceforge and elsewhere is being created in their spare time - if you are in the software business because you love coding, it shouldn't be a surprise when people go home and create something of their own to tackle a problem, create a game, provide them with a better debugging environment or whatever, without the pressures of commercial development.
Recently, there have been more companies providing salaries to fund development of particular open source projects - this speeds up the development process enormously, but it doesn't reduce the fact that people are still able to contribute their own skills to further these projects regardless of they are being paid by RedHat or Ximian or whoever. Don't think that Open Source development will disappear if all the commercial companies who contribute go out of business - it might grab less headlines, but it will go on.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I wonder if he would partially attribute this decision to the accident he was involved in. It seems like events like that make us appreciate life... and, depending on your view, get out from behind your computer for a bit. :-)
Good luck Jason!
He finally figured out what is important. Yes, driven people tend to get things done, but a lot of them forget they have families and loved one and forget to spend time with them when available. LinuxPPC will continue and has a hell of a jump start thanks largely, if not entirely on Haas. Now he can get the rest of the college done and dabble in PPC AND have time for the important things in life, family and friends.
Sometimes people forget that the really important things in life are their family and get focused on things that will continue after they are gone.
For some of us, it took deployments and a war to figure that out. I'm glad he does have the time and chance to get to that conclusion.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
With OS X just now getting off the ground, it needs as much application support as it can get. Haaz has the know-how to take these excellent open source *NIX apps/utilities and make them fly on X. Hell, he single-handedly ported how many of them to PPC?
Anyway, Jason- thanks so much for all your hard work over the years, and good luck to you in all your future endeavors.
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
Technology companies have had a business strategy of working their employees until the burn out, for years. It doesn't matter if it's a doc com that you have a stake in or a monsterous existing and stable company.
It seems to me that this became a trend after the stabilization of the computer science coriculum at universities. Every industry seems to go through this cycle. An industry like the computer industry gets a tremendour boost by, say, the introduction of the PC, and a half a deckage goes by without there being an academic curiculum availagle to churn out reasonably qualified people, then as soon as that curiculum is in place, companies feel that they have a never ending supply of grist for the mill. The same is true for the rapid growth of the internet. With the advent of an easy interface to information (the web), growth is spurred, and qualified people are difficult to find. The academic community lags about half a decade behind, but as soon as a curiculim is developed - and I saw a TV ad for a trade school advertising "become a certified webmaster" yesterday - companies feel their is a never ending supply of talent out there.
This leads to the companies working people to the bone and relying on the academic world to keep churning them out., not only does this have a negitive impact on the people thrust into these jobs with little or no exxperience, but it affacts the highly qualified personel as well. They are now forced to compete with those less experienced, and less qualified, on equal footing - because of course management doesn't understand what it takes to manage these technologies anyway, so they don't make the distinction between tradeschool graduates and truly experienced personel.
Now lets see if I can reign this in and make it apply to Jason's situation. Well, there are those of us who truly enjoy our jobs and do the work for that reason alone. There are those whodo it because they have a large stake in the company, and there are those who do it to put food on the table. The problem is, the glut of truly unqualified people in the industry now, which are not recognized as un-qualified, allows companies to pressure everyone to do the 80 hour work week thing, just to compete.
Jason was trying to make a business work. Most of us who are doing the same, have seen it get infinately harder to move his company forward in the industry, due in most part to corporate inability to understand that this industry is just like any other. It is now stable. It will always be there, and truly qualified staff are just as hard to come by as in any other industry.
My best wishes to Jason in his new endevours, and congradulations on making a good choice!
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Good for you Jason. Before anyone say LinuxPPC is dieing; I say that by the time you finish your degree, LinuxPPC will still be alive and kicking. And when you are recharged, I am sure we can expect more good things from you. Come back soon.
On to some slighly OT comments about LinuxPPC in general...
I feel that the Macs are often overlooked as a platform for Linux. I recently got a chance to install LinuxPPC on an old 9600 for various benchmarking. It is easy to install (and co-exist well with MacOS) and extremely reliable as you'd expect from Linux. Macs are not just for artists, they are real number crunching machins, especially the G3 and G4. And they look good while doing it :-)
Forget OSX, "UNIX" is already on the Mac and it is called LinuxPPC.
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Codeala - Just another mindless drone
The C in CISC stands for complex. The R in RISC for reduced. Wouldn't the register rich chip have more then the register poor?
Yes, but the "IS" in both acronyms stands for "instruction set". The PowerPC registers far outnumber the i386 registers.
One would think, though, that someone would take these things into account when they do a port from one platform to another.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Recently I was on IRC when this guy was beefing about paying for the CD of OpenBSD when he could just download it instead of having the ISO, not neccessarily related but hear me out. I argued with this guy for a few minutes pointing out the fact that developers often create these OS' on their own spare time, and $30.00 is relatively cheap considering most Open Sourced operating systems are heaven compared with others.
I often wonder how people manage to continously create some of the most useful open sourced products when they are not getting paid for it. Don't get me wrong I understand life isn't all about money, but you have to sometimes look at the realities of life, and you do need money to pay your bills.
To all the open source developers most of us appreciate your works extremely much, and for the majority of us who do understand life as it is, I know speaking for myself I would rather purchase a CD every here and there to support you as much as I can. Maybe its time many start looking into ways of recognizing the developers of the products they're using, and assist them with anything they can, even a dollar helps.
It keeps developers who are under tough times semi compensated when times can go rough for them, as well as provides incentive to create better work. Think about that for a quick second. If you were in the opposite person's shoes you would hope someone would do the same for you.
Sadly I hope these layoffs/out of business/quittings/etc don't affect the overall Open Source segment in the long run. Maybe its time most Open Source developers start using Pay Pal for tips on their sites. I know I would kick in between 5-10$ for products I use. Multiply that by about 2000 others and you have a nice little salary for a side job.
hellraiser
360 degrees of Karma