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Linux Router Project Dead
An anonymous reader submits: "The Linux Router Project is no more. This single-floppy distro was a great tool for building a number of simple super-low-cost network devices. The maintainer has a lot of bitter words about its demise, and it is sad to see it go."
However, it is explicit in the GPL, you release your stuff under it and on the one hand you can build on the work of all the others before you by incorporating any other GPL stuff, and on the other hand you really do lose control of your own code. That's the deal to get access to the growing body of great works that are available in the GPL already.
Reading between the lines, this guy is tired of not having enough money to get by, and the whole goodbye message is mainly a plea to some company to set him up with a job to keep it going. I can very much understand that and I hope this comes true for him, and it might if some companies are actually reliant on his code. But because of the inherent loss of control, its very difficult to translate even a great GPL project into a paycheck.
This was to be expected, as Netcraft recently reported that the already beleaguered Linux Router Project had really low numbers, consistent with the number of Usenet posts.
In all seriousness though, it's sad to see a good project go.
Vonal Declosion
2003-06-22
LRP == R.I.P. (1997-2002)
With great pain, I must now state:
The operating system that helped to create the embedded Linux marketplace, the Linux Router Project (LRP), is dead.
As of January of this year I have finally accepted the fact I will likely never be able to develop LRP into the operating system it could have been. A full 6 months later I'm forcing myself to update this page to reflect this. It is not an easy thing to give up on your life's work.
I am also now semi-retired as a computer engineer. Aside from my general disgust at the computing industry and what the Internet has become, scrambling around for scrapes of work and praying for the next good money project that eventually ends suddenly in a few months, just isn't keeping food on the table. I've looked quite a bit for some stable work, but plumbers make more hourly then Sys Admins in South Florida. Either I move to California (never!) or move on. I am now reserved to do the latter. With LRP remaining an unachievable goal I don't even feel much desire to work with computers anymore.
My many contributions to the computing community has reaped very little personal benefit for myself. As I now struggle to pay the bills I can not help but feel quite pissed off at the state of affairs, for myself and the other authors who contributed massive amounts of time and quality work, only to have it whored by companies not willing to give back dime one to the people that actually created what it is they sell. Acknowledgement and referral would have at least been acceptable. Few companies do even that.
Care to tell me what Embeddix (for one) is based off of? Ever offer me work Caldera? Even when I asked?
Well actually I'm glad they didn't as I would hate to think I could have benefited those scumbags any further...but I think you, the reader, gets the point I'm making.
Some companies did contribute directly to the project. However a few thousand dollars or a few computers does not let a programmer eat next month. As desperately as I have tried for the last 4 years I have been unable to get any type of sustainable funding for LRP development or steady work which would allow such. (It might have happened late in 2001, but after many 100 hour weeks of coding....that contract was terminated and so were any hopes of dedicating future time to LRP development.)
I actually have done more work on LRP 5.0 then anyone has seen. Yes LRP *5.0*. LRP 4.0 was brought to an alpha stage January 2001 and I was not happy with it. It was a gorgeous rehash of the same old Unix shit. Not acceptable to me. I began to explore some ideas I previously had but thought were not realistic to pursue. They instead turned out to be ideal.
This operating system had a good deal of specifications outlined for it and some preliminary proof-of-concept coding done. To this day I am only beginning to see very minor bits of what I had expected to have in production the summer of 2001. You see, unlike the current pile of Linux distributions which are based on ~20 year old obsolete mechanisms, I was working on something that was from scratch. How different would it have been?
* A new shell (no bash, no ash, no sh at all!)
* A new shell scripting language
* A new (universal) packaging scheme (would retrofit other OSes)
* A true application management system
* A new core process management system (No 'init' here...)
That's just a short list from memory, for the sake of making people ill with longing. (YES, YES, Burn with desire! Muhahaha!) Even the syntax for the scripting language was designed. The full architecture for the packaging system was laid out. Oh yeah, and the base of this OS would have all fit in ~8MB of space. The name of this operating system and it's specifications, shall still remain UNRELEASED.
Unfortunately it's not going to happen. Wish it could. I'd like to hope someone with 6 figure$ to burn wants this to happen, but I need to grow up and move o
I can see where he's coming from, but after reading that text I don't feel sorry for him at all. It sounds like he's just thrown all his toys out of the pram because no-one will pay him to work on his own project. I'm sure everyone here would *love* to be paid to do their own thing, but this just isn't going to happen!
Get a real job - in computing or otherwise, and if you want to write a "router on a disk" in your spare time, then go for it. If you don't want to, let someone else take it over.
What happened to all these sponsorships?
His site is now well and truly slashdotted
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Maybe now that project page has been /.'d that more people are aware of its demise and may lend a hand to revive it? Either it will get it's 1-2 days of fame and then be forgotten about or there might be a resurgence in working on it again?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Don't get me wrong but I think this is the first GNU project to die do to the current economic system we find ourselfs in. Also I don't think things would be much better in CA as he might belive, but who am I to state, I am in South Western PA. I have heard a ham friend of mine, say that he will be forced to move out of state because there is no work for computer people in Pittsburgh. ( I feel I am one the lucky ones now, I have gotten involved with a start up that looks like it will have a good future, it is already turning a profit in its first year of existance, but to be on the safe side, I am still keeping my "day" job at cmu till things start to go well for the startup) But I think that people with computer skills will find it harder to get work, what with the flood of people comming out of tech schools, and the loss of computer jobs to both the dotcom bust and outsourcing IT jobs to Asia. but only time will tell.
I think it's the smell of burning bridges...
...or does his list of features that would have made the next version so amazing (e.g. all new shell, all new scripting language, etc.) read a bit like "all new wheel, invented from scratch"?
Maybe it would have been great. But all I see is him claiming he was going to throw out most of the core utilities. This in and itself doesn't make anything great. It's only great if whatever replaces them is so much better that it was worth the effort doing it. Otherwise, it really is just reinventing the wheel.
Perhaps I don't have enough perspective on the LRP to understand why this is such a big deal, but reading the page leads me to believe that the LRP had become one of those projects that was much, much more ambitious than it needed to be. Projects like that will always have a hard time surviving. Sure, it's tragic that programmers have a hard time finding work, and that companies who freely sell and profit from Linux have a hard time "giving back" to the open source programmers who made it possible. On the other hand, I find it difficult to morn a project that, so far as I can tell from what little I see on that exit letter, was something that was neither practical nor maybe even particularly necessary.
-Rob
"Dead" is probably a little overstated, but open source burnout is a real problem for small teams. A product that becomes popular makes great demands on one's time, and when times are hard financially, this quickly turns into a losing situation.
Maybe I'll start a counselling centre for desperate OSS programmers...
Q. I feel inadequate, I have thousands of users asking for features, but I can't deliver _and_ keep my family fed. -- Frantic, IL
Dear Frantic,
Even the best software companies take their time adding features. Don't believe everything you hear about "internet time". Good products of any kind take years to build. Relax. Take your time.
Q. I'm working all my free time on project X, but no-one seems to care. Sure, my users love it, but in job interviews, it's worth nothing. -- Pissed Off, CA
Dear Off (or should I call you Pissed?),
Don't confuse art and business, and for that matter, don't mix them either. OSS is art, you do it because it makes you feel great. Only if you are a truly great artist will people appreciate your work, and you usually have to die first. Get a day job on other merits - perhaps a nice tie - and do your art when the inspiration takes you.
Q. how do I make money from my OSS project? -- Destidude, NY
Dear Destidude,
Money? Did you start it for money? Nah. You started it because you thought "hey, I can do that?" Let me remind you of a basic rules of business: if you want to make money, find a group who have money to spend and make something they want. Who are you selling to? Do they have money? Right. Now stop complaining and change your CV to include "Open Source Migration Consultant".
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
the linux router project homepage is no more
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
...but why is this guy releasing a GPLed system and then moaning that it isn't making him any money? Of course companies aren't going to donate a whole goddamn salary in exchange for your benevolence; their shareholders certainly didn't invest in them because those companies are altruistic. Some companies donated some equipment and even some substantial sums of money and that's something to be grateful for. But as for Embedix being based off LRP? Well, sorry mate, they are quite within their rights. Read the GPL -- you don't see Mr Torvalds screaming at them because he feels he's owed something for using their kernel do you?
/. stories are anything to go by (hmm...) so I'd fully agree with this guy if he wants to change profession or at least hunker down for the time being; doing what you love these days can be a painful exercise. And, though I use a more general purpose dist on my border server, the LRP does look like a very useful system and must have been quite an asset for Linux at the time (I wouldn't be surprised if most of those "You can't make NT do THAT on a spare 386 can you?" chants originated from this project).
;)
Look don't get me wrong, the computing economy sucks these days, yeah. Workers are treated like crap if
But come on man, if you're reading this, don't blast so many people on your way out who, if anything, were more generous than they needed to be. Well, except Caldera. *wink*
And don't complain if you're not making money because you're giving your only product away. Like the adage about the tramp who wants God to make him win the lottery, meet him halfway and buy the friggin ticket
I always thought this would be a good idea. You'd be able to use things like samba with the extra disk space that a cdrom provides.
With the price of PC components dropping so rapidly, and how much Linux's iptables absolutely blows as a firewall compared to, say, OpenBSD's pf, this was a sure thing destined to fail.
Just think about this for a moment -- "single floppy distro." You take one of the most unreliable forms of disk media, the floppy disc, and expect it to run something continuously and reliably, such as a firewall/router. You can easily build a PC for $50, put BSD on it (which by the way is easier to install than Debian and easier to configure than iptables), and spend your time doing something more useful, like partying with girls instead of configing your firewall.
Truly an american icon.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Have you looked at Mikrotik ? Not exactly the same by imagination but that's what I like. Very robust.
Head to this link:
http://www.mikrotik.com/download.html
You can download a free trial.
Have fun.
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue67/fevola.html
Live's to short - do another mile.
Of the two projects that seem to be focused on the router end of things, Basic Linux and Gibralter, both links are 404'ed. Looks like they are dead.
Like this gent really need to understand the difference between "job" and "spare time". The only people that get paid to do what they love are porn stars. And I'm sure they bitch too.
Linux Router Project is base for many single floppy etc distros. Most widely used are probably LEAF branches - http://leaf.sourceforge.net/ and Coyote Linux Floppy Firewall - http://www.coyotelinux.com/.
what do you expect when you give your work away for free? this is something anyone who works on open source projects should wthink about. Ideology is one thing but it alone wont feed you. .bombs)
Simply put, OSS and free software in genreal is not practical. Giveing stuff away for free makes no money. (something we learned from the
If so many companies use the software you sure could have licenced it.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
2003-06-22
LRP == R.I.P. (1997-2002)
With great pain, I must now state:
The operating system that helped to create the embedded Linux marketplace, the Linux Router Project (LRP), is dead.
Ummmm..... dude, you are mistaken. If the Linux Router Project is truly GPL then it cannot die. It really does not make a difference whether the creator of a GPL program decides to call it quits or not. In the long term you do not matter anymore. Under the GPL your program will live as long as other people are interested in developing and maintaining the code, your feelings are not important to its survival. In fact, your complains just sound like sour grapes. If your life sucks then make yourself a new life, don't blame other people for not acting the way you wish they would for your own benefit.
The way I have been getting by is working as a consultant for remote clients. I also did it for a couple years before I moved away from California. Now, it's more difficult than holding a regular job, and it's not secure, but it has many advantages, one of which is that you can live in a nice place - for example, Not In Silicon Valley.
I'm sorry to see the LRP die. I subscribed to the list around the time I moved to Maine, and I think they're a great bunch of people. But I don't believe that there's no way that one can make a living in programming anymore.
If I can do it from Maine, he can do it from Florida.
Since I left California, I haven't had any clients from anywhere near where I lived. They've been from Kansas, New Jersey, The Bahamas, California, and Ontario. Just last week I got inquiries from Germany and Taiwan.
If you want to know how I find clients, read Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants, How to Promote Your Business on the Internet and You Can Help by Referring Clients.
It's certainly not easy, in fact it's downright crazy sometimes, but I have been working steadily throughout the economic downturn, I still own my house, and I eat more or less regularly.
And I live in a nice place.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I've seen a lot of programmers/sysadmins leave their jobs after 4-5 years. This high turn over rate is driven not only by the age discrimination, but also high rates of burn-out among programmers. It's similar to the financial consulting market, where people are worked to death until they get sick of it and leave for another job that's less stressful. Sure, the pay is good, but quality of life suffers. And with the tech downturn, they pay isn't what it used to be either.
What I hate is the current business mentality of "let's burn out this bunch of programmers since we can hire fresh ones out of college next year." It diminishes programmers as disposable labor. Hopefully now that the boom is over and the market isn't flooded with new programmers, this attitude will subside. I hope.
Anyone else want to comment on this?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I agree with nearly everyone here. It's time for the Hackers quote:
"Yak, yak, yak. Get a job!"
It reminds me of the developer of the compiler LCC who got really pissed off that no-one was buying his pay-for version. I emailed him, and pointed out that either he was doing LCC because he loved to write it, in which case money was a bonus, not a necessity even if that meant writing it in his spare time, OR he was just writing it to make money, in which case: deal with the harsh reality, you can't make a living off it, do something else.
I belive that advice would serve this guy well too.
graspee
i tried some time ago to get LRP to work. PITA. i tried freesco, a bit easier. i actually use an old P166/32MB RAM with RH 6.2. it seems now, the best of breed is smoothwall. having tested it recently, i am going to switch soon.(after comcast doesn't f*** up my internet when they switch over 6/30.) floppies are not reliable, and are very limiting. i always thought the micro linux projects were more about "hey, look, see what we can do". which is totally cool. no doubt. and practical? tom's rtboot was mildly, but now, knoppix is the shit.
so the guy needs work and there is little out there, and he feels he didn't get support for his pet project. boo f***in hoo. freedom means the ability to choose the best product. and people just weren't choosing his.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
i don't have much sympathy for this character. thinking that people owe you things is a dangerous way of thinking. blatantly disregarding possible negative outcomes of license choice is even more foolish.
the childishly worded tell off doesn't help. oh yes, we will burn with desire, and the world will indeed be desolate without your new shell.
i think that anyone who cares about Free Software should be offended by this.
in short, good luck with the job thing, and take the necessary steps to avoid having the door striking any part of your body on your way out.
-=tonyt=-
What a whiney dick. "Oh my god!! You mean that, when I GAVE to the community, I wasn't guarenteed anything??"
:) Oh - and it has a TCP/IP stack. Oh - and an ipchains-ish thing to route/drop packets. Whoppie-do.
So it's a microkernel. So what. QNX's been doing this for years. And I first used QNX in 1995-1996 or so, and it was good.
Knowing that:
1) This guy's a whiney dickface.
2) There are other things out there that'll do the same thing.
I would NEVER consider EVER running with LRP. If it wasn't dead before, it's dead now. Absolutely.
PS - Hey, if the author of the drivel is reading this, learn the difference between "than" and "then". It's horrible to read something like that from a "computer engineer", or anyone for that matter.
No wonder he didn't get a job.
;)
The point about GPL is that you can't get ripped off. If they rip you off, you can force them to release their derivative work also as GPL. If he chose the wrong license, he got what he deserved.
I put my embedded work under GPL and actually managed to get some funding. If it's GPL, people have to talk to you to use it commercially, you know? That's the beauty of GPL.
Anyway, I can't say I found LRP to be as great as this guy actually thinks it is. And this childish "look what you missed" bullshit is not going to get him anywhere either. The world is full of companies who are not making any money, Caldera and Lineo being two very good examples he cites himself. Don't expect them to pay you if they don't have to.
So far, almost every company that hired has tried to rip me off in the end. That's how it goes. So choose wisely, chose GPL.
BTW: A new init system? Got one of those as well... I even wrote my own libc. And you know what? People are helping with the projects, in fact, many people are helping me with the projects. Feel free to look at all the names in the dietlibc CHANGES file! I think it's how you treat people that makes them help you. If your code is readable and you treat people well, they will help. You won't get big front page articles on Wired, but you'll create a damn good project, people will know your name. And you will get invited, too! Meet me at Linuxtag 2003!
A single floppy distro for network appliances is actually a great idea. Write protect the floppy, run with no hard disk. This way even if it does get cracked, all you have to do is cycle the power - there is no way for it to get 'infected' with anything.
I don't think it matters so much whether it's based on *BSD or Linux or runs ipf or iptables, or which you or I prefer. Those are minor points. The main thing is that by limiting it's size and making sure that it can run entirely in memory with no writable storage attached, you have an enourmous security benefit. Not only can't it be infected, it's also a lot easier to audit, it doesn't have space for all sorts of cruft like any of these systems leave on your HD after a typical install - just the essentials.
Floppies are unreliable? Sure they are. So what. You keep a disk image on your workstation and make a new one whenever need be. When the floppy goes bad you'll notice the next time you boot, and replace it. Big deal.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
...and it was actually my greatest hesitation to updating the site instead of just dropping it off the face of the earth.
I guess every dreg and their ugly mother will crawl out of the wood work to find fault with something I did now. Have fun wasting your key strokes.
But I felt I owed a 'what happened' to the people out there that loved LRP for all it really was: Compact, Efficient, Powerful, and most of all a Unique Operating System.
But just 3 hours after I finalized the last update?? Jeez...I guess people are just dying to find anything to submit. It's always interesting when your apache processes jump from 5 to 152...
Dave
Its sad, but on the other hand, its just like a buddy of mine says:
You don't make any money off of free.
For those of you who are interested, the meat of the LRP project lives on in LEAF. I suggest anybody that feels sorry for David and his "take my toys and leave" speech should take a LONG look at the LEAF project and what it offers and the amount of people involved with it. You'll see the real reason for David packing up and going home.
Hats off to everybody involved in LEAF, keep up the good work.
Open source projects don't die, they just get archived.
C'mon, just because the maintainer throws a hissy-fit don't mean it's dead - would you call the Linux kernel `dead' just because Linus decides to pack his bags and go live in Antarctica?
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
This guy went into it with the wrong frame of mind.
He EXPECTED something for his work!
If your going to start up something in GPL and release it.. don't EXPECT anything more than a "Hey thats cool" e-mail in return..
If by some chance a company decides to hire you cause its a good product then GREAT, but don't winge because father christmas forgot you.. jeez
having said that.. its sad to see it go.. but meh.. what am I going to do about it..?
Nothing... I used it for two days then dumped it for a better product..
Them's the breaks..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
That way, other people could still get the code, but at least he could re-incorporate all of the changes to date into a new propreitry system, and start charging for it. Whether people would buy it or not is a different story, but if he made changes people really wanted and they weren't in the free BSD-licensed version, he would at least have a shot of making money from it without depending entirely on donations. (AND there would still be a free version). Of course, this is Slashdot. People here are convinced the GPL is better for some reason.
We hang the petty thieves, but appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
Well, there's two points I want to make about this rant of his:
1. No open source project is ever truly dead. I don't think I have to explain why this is, but this is one of the best parts of free software.
2. The author of the project is completely justified in feeling bitter that he's having a hard time putting food on the table. However, this is not (and he does point this out) totally the fault of open source. Honestly, in today's post-dot-com market, do you ever think he could have gotten anywhere had he built this project from the ground up as a proprietary system? All by himself? With a few employees, maybe?
No, something's wrong here, and it ain't Linux. (Randroids beware, vicious attacks on the market coming...)
The fact of the matter is that the market is a horrible, horrible place for brilliantly useful ideas to thrive if they aren't (tadaaaaa!) marketable... If they can't turn enough of a profit to not only feed you, your employees, your landlord (if you're brick and mortar), and your shareholders, then it's not gonna play.
COUNTER-ATTACK: No, this does not mean that I feel that State direction would be a better means of producing things. The market may suck, but the government gives new meaning to the term 'fucked up piece of shit.'
We're gonna have to figure things out quick, because situations like this are going to become more and more prevalant. The first part of figuring things out is admitting that the dot-con boom helped out open source tremendously. First off, a lot of excess money floatin' around means it's easy to grab a bit of the overflow. Second, ridiculously high paying jobs that are easy to come by means that we can easily work on open source projects on the side. And third, due to the omnipresence of incredibly stupid middle managers who don't know the difference between TCSH, BASH, AND M*A*S*H, means we can work on this stuff while on the company clock, and nobody's the wiser.
But that sweet deal is gone, boys and girls, and it's probably never coming back. Because open source is invincible (meaning it can't be killed, not that it can't be hurt) means that it survived the fallout a lot better that many proprietary systems. But that doesn't mean it's gonna become a whole lot harder to develop.
However, the catch-22 is that, as the economy gets shittier, the more people need cheap software.
So how do give the people (and ourselves) what they want, while at the same time, having enough money to eat and pay rent? (*)
I never said I had the answers, though. But it'll be interesting to see what comes out of it all.
Dominion
Anarchist FAQ
* NOTE: Money to eat and pay rent does not imply that _any_ of us deserve to eat at five star restaurants and live in $1800/mo studio apartments. Let's get off our high horses. We lucked out for a few years in the 90's, but it's ridiculous to assume that we could be a part of that club for very long. And it doesn't really matter, anywhere with cheap rent and good burritos is gonna be infinitely more interesting than any yuppie enclave where the street musicians have been put in jail and everybody goes to sleep at 9:00pm.
The Linux Router Project is no more.
It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This project is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, It's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-PROJECT!!
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
I must agree that the list of features for the new version sounded like a hugh leap wherein the yeild would have to be unusually significant to justify the effort. I personally need another scripting language like I need another nose.
/etc/init.d/network restart, and Voila!
/.
As for the particularly necessary part. I would have to argue that LRP was extremely useful in helping Linux penetrate the embedded systems market. The original idea was to get all the cool features of the kernel and just enough OS to be useful on a floppy. Once someone got it working, and working well, it was suddenly very easy to offer your [insert generic internet object] with routing/firewalling/web-based configuration stuff. All you really had to do was add one of the many excellent tiny webservers, and a pile of cgi-scripts to generate the config files from the forms and call
Getting a barebones-but-configurable linux out there spawned piles of projects for embedding it, like remote data collection, PDA O/Ss, net-boot computers, and piles of 'reuse' projects for PCs that couldn't/wouldn't have a hard drive in them.
In summary, I don't know what his latest rev. would have contributed, but LRP was the start of something cool that we now seem to take for granted. Me more than most people. As I hit submit my old 200Mhz/hard-driveless/cdromless LRP router (up for 4560h now) will pass the packets to
The web site is gone for some reason
Ooooh, a bridge troll! ;)
No, I'm not giving you my money.
You dont want to go on cause your so short on money or what ever, thats fine, its your call. BUT...
someone else should pick up where you left, I suggest posting the project for adoption if i may say. You do wanna see your baby live, despite the fact you cant feed it, dont you. So i suggest you document the thing really good, as to make it easier for the next generation of coders to do a good job.
The lunatic is in my head
Or something the like, the premise of open source except for money making ventures with linux. You don't have to be a big company to make an income from linux.
On a side note I thought this was just a very cool hobby.
"The maintainer has a lot of bitter words about its demise, and it is sad to see it go."
So is the maintainer the only eunuch to work on the project, or were they using nothing but UNIX?
Either way, coooool.
Nothing like going out in a /.ing Blaze Of Glory
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
In fact what happened was that the LRP project leader fell out with just about all the other developers working on it due to political views he expressed on the LRP website.
Most of the other developers found his views pretty outrageous so went and formed the LEAF project The original developer carried on more or less alone with LRP.
So to all intents and purposes, what was once LRP is still alive and well in the form of LEAF.
... you might have noticed this:
LRP == R.I.P. (1997-2002)
Thus he spent alot more than 6 months on the project... it was 5 years!
... just try FLI4L (english page, there is also a german page). It is a modular router that can be extended to provide ISDN, DSL, Modem, and many, many more features listed on the web page. A simple ISDN/DSL router with port filtering ("firewall") fits on a floppy, with more features, you may need more room. You can get modules to install fli4l on a harddisk (or compact flash or IDE flash), other modules support booting from CDROM. With etherboot, you can also boot from a TFTP server.
I run fli4l since years on my router (some old 100 MHz Pentium clone made by AMD), the last modification was to replace the old HDD with a 64 MBytes IDE flash module (made by Transcend) -- 60 MBytes are still free.
Now, there are only three moving (i.e. noisy) parts left: one floppy for updates, CPU fan and PSU fan. The floppy will soon be replaced by an etherboot EEPROM on the internal ethernet card, set to boot from local drives by default. The CPU fan will be replaced by a larger heat sink, and the PSU will be replaced with a fan-less PSU.
Denken hilft.
leaf.sf.net
Not dead. Not even comatose.
Yes, code forks suck.
Yes, trying to make ends meet writing free software is no easier than with many other labors of love.
While I personally feel sorry for Cinege, I use the result of his work 24/7. Not a bad legacy...
You mention how you turned an old laptop into a router w/ this to save yourself some cash. I did a similar thing w/ a different setup, but it was the same (a linux based router).
But lets ignore everything out there - you hit something on the head, how much does it take to get a hardware router now a days? I have seem some as low as $30 before. But to run it on a laptop or a computer? We are talking some solid amount of cash there (not to mention the resources that you are tying up). Personally, I think we are talking about a project for a market that really isn't there. I have an old P120, the one that I ran my router on. IMHO, I have much better uses of it than having it route packets for me (quite noisily I might add), especially when, for $70, I can get a Router/Firewall/Print Server (which is also SILENT).
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Most people would speak differently to their friends about problems at home than they would to USA Today.
He ended the project. People coming to his website may want to know why. He's telling them. It's a single page of text. That seems pretty reasonable to me, since we've all seen worse. The guy didn't mean to impose on you.
I can't begin to count the number of people who write nasty "why's he making such a big deal about this" posts in response to some poor person who put something up on a webpage that gets ten thousand hits a month which attracted the interest of slashdot. It's like being angry that your neighbour is saying boring things to his wife on their patio again.
What is "fdgw" ?
:-). You can use it as small router, natbox or ADSL router. It is a minimal operating system.
...
"fdgw" is one floppy version of NetBSD/i386. [1] It can run on old machine without HDD
For example, old pc (e.g. IBM PC110) becomes:
pretty ADSL router
pretty router
natbox
your home psuedo firewall
This system also supports DHCP and syslog.
This is similar to router product, off course. The extension is easier and better than router product.
Since the floppy size is very limited, we cannot build all-in-one box. So, "fdgw" provides several models for several purposes. Each model has different built-in applications and kernel configurations. For example, simplest model, "natbox" model supports IPv6 but ADSL router model not support v6 since ADSL router needs more programs, such as pppd and rp-pppoe, than natbox model.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Man...I thought that guys good bye letter was pretty annoying, but then I read your post and it really put "annoying" in perspective.
Give him a break. He obviously cared about the project and has had to call it quits. He used his own site to vent a little, so what?
And there are many of us who live in reality (or at least I think we do, but who's to say, really?) that make good money AND are appreciated.
I used to develop for LRP, but stoped as I found that 75% of my time was spent porting samba, exim, etc and fixing mount bugs for NFS as people wanted this for security.....
/etnwork setup package netscript-2.4 to Debian Sid as I am a Debian Developer. this ontains the sum total of my experience as a professional router developer, security neworking specialist etc. More of the Debian Router project will be merged as they are ready and the base parts of it end up in Debian.
I moved on to base all my work round an HD based system as this meant that I could concentrate on thenetworkign and routing software.
Unlike Dave Cinege, I am still using Debian Route Project in my job. You can find it up at http://debian-router.anathoth.gen.nz/
It is still alive and kicking, and I have just submitted the iptables
The stuff on my site would be a good match for Trusted Debian as well.
Enjoy!!
>I'd like to hope someone with 6 figure$ to burn wants this to happen
HAHAHAHA.
One more time:
AHAHAHAH.
ROTFLMAO.
Oh, please, $100,000? For half a year's work? If you're worth that much, you'd have started your own business already based on this software.
>but I need to grow up and move on instead of continuing to wait on the tooth fairy to show up to help me persue my artistic dreams.
Yes, you do. Part of growing up is realising what you're worth, and what you're skills are in. Seems you already know the latter, but hit the proverbial brick wall with the former.
Very few people are worth $200k+ per year, and the few that are don't go off on tirades like that.
Sorry to be blunt, but get real.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
So, cocaine is your problem.
When reading your whining, I was thinking the same thing as what someone else wrote on here: You need to learn to market yourself if you want to make money. You can hope all you want that you're going to make it big but it never happens unless you actually do something about it.
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
If you want to make money, find people with money, find out what they want, and make it - the faster the better.
If you want to have fun, find something you want to do, and do it.
Pretty hard, eh?
It's not uncommon for me to GPL a "commodity" section of my codebase. (I prefer LGPL) and much of my codebase is similarly licensed. Others come along, use my stuff, and improve on it, and I get a free ride on their improvements.
However, there's plenty of my stuff that nobody's gonna see without signing an NDA first.
Busines != Pleasure. Get used to it.
Use your open source stuff on your resume. I've donated alot towards the documentation of PHP-GTK. It's on my list of credentials, all right, even though I didn't do it for money.
But for god's sake, if you give something away, forget about charging for it!!!
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It sounds to me like the developer didn't realise why micro-Linux systems are interesting. The whole value is that most of the code base is widely used and is probably quite reliable.
Perhaps the author lost his way. OSS may sometimes pay your lunch, but only if somebody wants you to mod it so badly that they are prepared to pay for it. The best it can usually do is to help get you consulting gigs.
See my journal, I write things there
hmmmm.....
How about. Release work under shareware or just really cheap like $5 or $10 per CD! then make at least something on your time and effort.
Duh!
Blah, leaf has been dead & outdated for years. Everyone has moved to LEAF.
http://leaf.sourceforge.net/
This is not a loss. LRP was great tech about 4 years ago. The world moved on, and now everyone uses better tech. Really, just checkout Leaf Bearing for some current 'router on a floppy' tech, and don't even bother reading this guys poor, sad story. He's starting to sound like the CEO of enron.
What's with all your expectations?
Life is just life. So you failed at something. Big deal. It didn't happen because of karma or other cosmic forces, it just happened because stuff like this happens. When are people going to realize that there are ups and downs and you gotta take both in stride? DO move on with your life and don't sulk in it. Also if you feel that your ideas are so brilliant then why are you taunting people by taking your secrets to your death? Why not share them and let those with more time and interest carry them out. Maybe then you'll get some credit. And about the companies who used your work without giving back, again these things happen. You can point your finger but nobody is going to stand up in your defense. You seem to think that life should be fair or something. It isn't. I don't mean to make the world sound like one big hole but again life is just life. If you're a soldier keep you're chin up and reprioritize your goals in life. Don't hold onto your expectations. Realize that each day is new and you just gotta push on.
That was the fatal mistake.
Many businesses out there quietly fail. Don't get all bitter about it buddy.
Forget to take his lithium?
Now, I have a spare 486 or pentium 100MHz or similiar, and want to set up a DSL router (for several home computers). LRP works beautifully for the job, tried it - but my spare computer already has a spare harddisk inside and the biggest cost involved in the home router is buying a second network adapter anyway.
So what do I do? Install a "big" distro that takes most of the 1GB or 2GB HD, spend more time with it than what LRP would take to configure, AND make the router machine do much other stuff as well, like having my data files on a computer that's always accessible from my university, for example. And, I make it share the printer, for I only have one for several computers, have a httpd to play with (or keep my personal pages and email on), have a box with the good irc client (irssi) that I can use even from Windows etc etc. These are the things I actually do; I could probably think of more.
Now, what's the benefit of LRP? Not needing a HD. And, it being easier to set up. I being a Linux geek prefer spending lots of time tweaking a box that will do more.
He wants to retire in the Bahamas and smoke loads of fucking weed!
If he wants to make money - make it urn under Windows. Every arsehole knows that.
Good riddance. Loser.
Has Slashdot developed a mind of its own? This is where the page stops loading:
"100 hour weeks of coding....that contract was terminated and so were any hopes of dedicating future time to LRP development.)
I actually have done more work on LRP 5.0 then anyone has see"
LOL, and now we will never see it!
It's sad for me to see another fellow programmer throwing their work away because of the frustrations like this. So here my take on money and open source mainly for other programmers on /.
I have looked at pro's and con's of different licensing for my own programs and here's my conclusion. If you are a programmer (eg, you are/will make your living on coding) don't release your program under the GPL or any open source software when you first release it. Why?
1) Because you aren't going to get that much code contribution anyways. The majority of your contribution will come in the form of bug reports whether your program is closed or open sourced.
2) Your time is worth something, the GPL essentially says it is worth zero. The GPL is great for hobby programmers, it's like gardening. You give your produce to friends and get bragging rights.
3) Employer don't care whether the software on your resume is open source or not as long as you wrote it.
3) If you want a way for people to contribute code, code in modules instead, and/or release an open sourced plugin SDK instead. Keep control of the core code. Dual licensing does not do this.
So when should you release it as an OSS? I believe when the project is worth zero. Because then it won't hurt you (emotionally or financially) to release it for free under the GPL.
Dear .com
.com that was going to change the world (and make me a multigazillionaire).
.com bastards out there, fsck you for flooding the market with all of your ideas. It was mine first, I am the ubergeek of all time and you ruined it for me by selling your vapourware.
.com by investing in the business or by working long hours and only getting paid in worthless shares - piss off as well. Gift horses, come here so I can stick my head so far up your throat you'll wonder why the goddam expression was ever coined.
Piss off you bastard. I invested my life's (2.5 years) work in setting up a
Damn you Sun Microsystems for not buying us out. I mean, we chose JAVA. JAVA man. I mean, we even rewrote your (perfectly fine) java.net base classes because we enjoy to reinvent the wheel.
And to all of you other
For those of you that did help my
Dave Winner
(winner _at i.am.a.stupid.naive.hippie.communist
Bifrost firewall/router (modified linux)
(Used by many swedish universities)
(developed by the agriculture one... funny)
http://bifrost.slu.se/index.en.html
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
This friendly troll brought to you by the Goatsemon Music Group Mirror http://nero-online.org/goatsemon/
Dear rotten.com,
I am unsure if you are aware of the problems that your "Incident with the bird" picture has caused on the popular technology website slashdot (http://slashdot.org).
Many users of this site's messageboards are posting links to http://smoke.rotten.com/bird/ and making text based representations of a bird on a man's penis. Frankly, while I am pro-freedom, this type of photo sickens me. Could you please move the location of the bird page on your site to keep slashdot readers from seeing things that are completeley unrelated to computers and technology? I'm not asking you to remove the content, just to relocate it.
FYI the text representation of the bird is:
*p_e_n_i_s_b_i_r_d_p_e_n_i_s_b_i_r_d*
p______...__________________________p
e____(_..__`'-.,--,_________________e
n_____'-._'-.__`\a\\________________n
i_________'.___.'_(|________________i
s____________7____||________________s
b___________/___.'_|________________b
i__________/_.-'__,J________________i
r_________/_________\_______________r
d________||___/______;______________d
*________||__|_______|______________*
p________`\__\_______|__/__''\______p
e__________'._\______/.-`____{}|____e
n___________/\_`;_.-'_________/_____n
i___________\_;(((____.--'\_/_______i
s_________.(((_____.-;\_____________s
b____.--'`_____,;`'.'-;\____________b
i_taco's____.'____'._.'\\___________i
r_dick_--'_________|__\_|___________r
d__________________\_\,_/___________d
*p_e_n_i_s_b_i_r_d_p_e_n_i_s_b_i_r_d*
(Note: CmdrTaco's penis length exaggerated for effect only)
with a link to the offensive site (http://smoke.rotten.com/bird/) underneath, these "Penis Birds" are posted by Penis Bird Guy, Penis Bird MAN and several other users.
Regards, Andrew J. Tosh
This friendly troll brought to you by the Goatsemon Music Group Mirror http://nero-online.org/goatsemon/
I feel for any project who's had a good run...but we don't just live and die by the GPL, no matter how noble that is.
I bought 25 486's from salvage ar $3.05US, each. Figuring in the one-time setup labor and the each-time configuration time, it just almost doesn't make sense to build and sell them when Linksys is able to put 2.5 kernels into their firmware and squeeze'em out for only $40US.
The cheap $3 hardware is great, but the memory's harder and harder to get, they won't access drives as large as 1G (which makes upgrades easier, etc) and paying "real" money for a machine, like a slow celeron or P2 (shudder) is still gonna be more than $40, more often than not.
Now sure, I love being able to use the same core talents on every device I use....I'd like to make a 'roomba' vacuum cleaner or a robot mower run on Linux so I could improve the AI in it so it can learn the 'proper' way to mow or vac. But it just doesn't make ecomomic sense. :(
RIP, LRP. We hardly knew ye.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
sorry folks, was using my friends laptop and forgot to cycle logins.
Are you willing to move? Are you willing to spend about half your time doing $stuff for someone else, if you're allowed free reign and support for your own projects the rest of the time? Are you willing to accept room and board as part of your pay?
Is it really all that bad? Fitting your OS onto a floppy disk no longer seems terribly important to me. A year or so ago, I built a complete, self-compiling LFS system that would fit onto a 64 meg flash drive. That's a *complete* system, including C libraries, compiler, LVS load-balancer, etc.. With hardware getting faster, larger, and cheaper, being able to fit things on a floppy doesn't seem quite as important.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
He trolled the Airsoft Retreat fourms and now he is begging for mercy!
C HIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=5128
http://www.airsoftretreat.com/forums/topic.asp?AR
Ah, my happyness at graduating (even with honors & a masters) in a couple of years is growing by the day. Is it true that there are no longer jobs out there for CS grads? Or is this just one big fat lie told by previously overpaid Americans?
Freesco is a single floppy router/dns/dhcp/etc.
We use LRP a lot with WaveLAN's here in Lithuania. Well, one thing is that floppies don't break (often) in harsh conditions, i.e. -15 degrees celcius in some attic under the roof the anthena is fixed. Nothing else can survive that- HDD drives fail for sure. 2nd- price. why buy a cdrom (or cdrw) drive for a 50 USD worth old computer (usualy used for routers here), when floppy can do the job for free.
Besides changing floppy disk is easy and quick if your access points are in the same town. Floppy is used only during boot time, and lasts for months or years. Oh- and you can do some fixes/upgrades remotely when you have floppy. So you would need CDRW otherwise.
--Coder
Yeah, that can be tiring... ;-)
Perhaps we should start designing a system to get voluntary payments from users to hackers? I'm currently mostly a user, and if simple and secure enough, I would certainly send a coin now and then. Paypal certainly doesn't cut it, so you don't need to mention that...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - David Cinege, a frustrated, unemployed computer programmer was found dead in his Maine home this morning, on the day his LRP project was shut down by SCO, a subsidiary of the RIAA. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to geek culture. Truly an American icon.
Everyone's slamming you right now for some reason, so I figured I'd throw in my opinion, which is that I'm sympathetic.
It is true, the reason to start a "free collaborative work" or whatever you want to call it, is for fun. However, as time goes, it is easy for the project to become more important. By that I mean you have a lot of users and developers, and it seems to take more and more of your free time. You then conclude that the project is an important part of computing, and must be completed. That is, it has moved beyond the hobby phase. Folks are using your project in real businesses, users are using it for real uses. It would be a sad state of the human race if such a useful project were not to finish, and so before the green alien in the flying saucer has a chance to laugh at humanity, you fart in his general direction and press on. Your project is now more important than your real job. You contribute a valuable effort to society, and you're broke off your ass. WTF?
Folks will tell you that this is because you made a stupid decision of participating in a "free collaborative work". I don't think this is true. It's wonderful to begin a project to scratch an itch, and in the beginning you weren't hurting for cash, so it's all good. Fine, they will then tell you that you made a stupid decision to continue the project, to waste all of your time on something when not enough is coming back to you in order to sustain it. Well, now you have given up on the project, so you will satisfy these critics. You are finally 'sane', now get a real job, right?
Wrong. At least I'd like to think so. Maybe it doesn't make economic sense, or maybe it doesn't fit with typical capitalist society, but this is what I see: I see a useful project dead. Certainly the project was useful for people, otherwise it wouldn't piss you off that no one is returning the favor. So now this project, which is surely useful, has been discontinued. Someone else could pick up the project and continue, sure, but would they be any more successful?
If you ask me, "that ain't right" (to quote Chris Rock from "Head of State"). In a better society, this useful project would be sustained somehow. I don't really have a solution for you. All I can say is that I understand your pain, and there are others out there that feel the same way, too. Unfortunately, the green alien is laughing.
An actively mantained, full featured, modular and (if neccessary) very compact Linux distribution for building routers, firewalls, gateways and the like can be found here: floppyfw.
Yeah, that's true.
Blizzard has forced them to close. The whole project disappeared from blizzard.org and from sf.net.
Blizzard haters, subscribe below:
There have been a lot of posts in this thread castigating the guy for the apparently heinous crime of writing GPL and expecting to make money off it, as though it's a logical contradiction -- some even explicitly stating that you write GPL/free software as a hobby, and if you're lucky you get a grant or a job.
This is plain ridiculous. Selling software and writing software are two wholly different things, but there's nothing at all about free software that prevents an individual or a business from selling it or making a profit on it. Whether a developer finds gainful employment at a commercial venture selling free software, or decides to write and market his or her own product, vendors can charge for free software and programmers can make money doing free software -- and there are any number of salary-earning individuals and profitable companies to illustrate this. Has the commercial=proprietary FUD become so ingrained that even GNU-loving slashdotters can't see beyond it?
Of course, I still agree that this guy's whining sounds petty and annoying.
Fuck it
Usually I hate pontificating about things I don't know enough about... ...but asides from this guy suffering from lack of commercial abilities to market his work, and being struck with a terminal case of second-system syndrome, wasn't he struck by the dreaded binary modules Linus loophole?
Meaning, lots of embedded work takes place as modules to odd devices. Companies he complain about like Lineo, Caldera and Embeddix have success by working with binary modules, what is much more difficult for an individual without the resources to develop something in-house without community participation or without credibility to sign a NDA.
Or am I just smoking?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I fully intend to use it for money... oh, you mean, don't write OSS for money. Gotcha.
-pyrrho
Just an ethical problem.
....he did more than most do and now just has to deal with real world manifestations of ethical conflicts.
If you want to do something, then do it and don't expect anything in return. And if you only do something when you expect something in return...shame over you! This is not a rant to Mr.
Doing something you like for money is whoring. Doing something you hate or don't care about for money is self destructive and whoring.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
Move on then. Better still, take up plumbing.
Am I the only person here who is getting tired of all the network types who were too short sighted to realise they were in a boom in around 2000? Why didn't you use some of that boom-money on preparing for the (blindingly obvious) normality that followed.
He could be as depressed as Kevin Flanagan was about his life's work .
/ in dustries/5893252.htm
.
...
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/business
It made me decide to close my Bank of """America""" account
The Irony...
Bank of America send 1,000 jobs to India
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Just as I wondered how the Internet was supposed to generate money, I ofen wonder how Programmers in the future will expect to be paid.
Although I agree that open source software is better, and I enjoy using and working on it, are we all just enabling large corporations to make loads of dough off our work while we starve in relitive obscurity? Are we acting in our own self interest when we basically work for free and allow anyone to use the fruits of our labor?
I wonder if this is the end of programming as a career that you can live off of. Garbage men don't go pick up garbage for fun in their spare time, the problem is programmers enjoy what they do and don't think of the economic consequences of doing so.
Someone please explain how programmers will make a wage they can live off of in the future. I've heard a lot of pie in the sky types of explanations (as I did about the Internet). Sure I believe that companies can make money off of open source, by selling supported and packaged "solutions" but that doesn't mean they need to pay the people who created the software they sell.
I think its time for us to start working in each other's interest. It seems that programmers are the new exploited class, and perhaps it is time to organize for better labor conditions and stop screwing ourselves over.
I like open source, but sometimes I secretly hope for it to fail. Otherwise, I fear, I will be working at MacDonalds, coming home to do my real work for free.
You complain that you could find no one to contribute, "Untrue to the opensource dogma, actually finding people to contribute work to a project is a task in and of itself." And that you weren't even recognized for your work, "Acknowledgement and referral would have at least been acceptable."
In this, you have wronged the hard work of people that have contributed to, improved, maintained, and taken leadership of something you started. The failings you've claimed are a reflection of yourself, not the community. Whatever is going on, you need to be significantly more honest with not only the community, but significantly more honest with yourself.
Judging from your use of "Winblows", I'm guessing you're fairly new on the scene, perhaps fresh out of college or high school, and haven't yet experienced the finer things of a UNIX sysadmin's career, like attempting to make the impossible happen day in and day out without so much as praise or acknowledgement.
Just wait a few years. You'll see. Don't think that your seemingly endless zeal and enthusiasm are *actually* endless.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
When one can pickup on ebay a Cisco 2514 for under $300 - or one of those consumer router for under $100.
For Christ's sake, what do those programmers eat?? With a few thousand Dollars, I can eat for a year or longer...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
LRP didn't just die. It evolved, or reincarnated. Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall (or LEAF) is the next step. Kernel 2.4 support, several ready distributions for different needs, packaging system, etc..
"LRP is dead" news is more like a bitter cry of an abandoned developer.. If he touts his "next version would've had all these magical abilities", why doesn't he release it? Even a partial implementation would probably attract attention and it could be integrated into other embedded projects.
Linux-on-a-floppy idea is generally just an issue of picking the right components and wrapping it up. I taught a linux-trainee to make an iptables-floppy in one night, just by cut-pasteing parts of a running debian system and compiling a custom kernel.
I'd say that the linux-floppy-culture owns most credit to uClibc and Busybox developers, for making embedded-sized libc and utilities.
Is this for real, Does the guy think he can start an OpenSource project and then company will magically donate/emply him ?? Get Real!!
I've read some of your past posts as well as the comments of others, and with all due respect, you seem a bit off your rocker.
Here, Here...
Words of wisdom... Finally.
The entire article is just a big whine. Yeah, so nobody paid you to write the code for your little pet project. So what? Who cares? At some point, programmers need to face the real world, and realize that a little bit of economics comes into life some time. Most people can't just sit on their asses writing code that other people percieve as being free for their entire lives. You can certainly try, but it's not likely to work. As much as I'd like to make a living writing sci-fi novels, it's not like you can just sit in a corner and do your thing and get away with it. Unless you're a complete genius. And, apparently, this guy isn't.
Plenty of people are posting that this shows something about the difficulty of open source or Linux development. It really doesn't.
Projects die and people burn out on all platforms.
It's bitter when it happens to you, but it's part of the game.
80% of small businesses fold without the first two years. It's even higher in IT. I suspect the numbers are similar for projects inside big companies, though the failure can be covered up. Even within Microsoft, over 50% of projects are reported to be cancelled before release, and many people burn out after a few years. It might not make Slashdot headlines but dig around enough in people's blogs and you'll find all the same depression and disillusionment and sorrow.
Hell, it could have been even worse if it was a commercial/closed source project. The guy might have lost a lot of money, rather than just feeling he wasted his time.
The one good thing about open source is that when a project shuts down, it doesn't have to die. Other people can restart it or fork it perhaps some time later. I think this is some consolation.
Sounds like the guy didn't have enough business sense. You can certainly make money off GPL stuff. Just offer a support contract. If you make a great product, you won't even spend much time supporting the product.
If he could offer something extra to these companies that his software alone couldn't, I bet they would pay him (quite) a few bucks.
Stop the brainwash
vaginitis.
but not to worry, i think I hear the whaaaaambulance coming.
As far as I am concerned, Linksys killed LRP. Their
little boxes were/are cheap and flexible. (Well
semi flexible - not much compared to a Linux box.)
... is now looking for funding for Duke Nukem Forever.
I was very shocked when I read the headline that LRP is dead. Then I quickly typed leaf.sourceforge.net into another browser windows and was very relieved that my beloved Bering is still alive and well. Thanks again to the developers. It works like a charm. How dare does Slashdot give me a near heart attack!
You get a nice job based on a tie -- and guess what, you have to sign one of those employment contracts that says "all your ideas/work/art are belong to us."
At which point, at least according to Caldera, means that Linux will belong dually to Caldera and this other company, and they will hit each other on the head for a while ---
-- way too messy.
Sorry, but when you're on the road to serfdom, often there aren't any good answers, and yes, the economy stalls.
You know, my brother's interpretation of an economy is "people doing things for each other", and he feels that a good economy is more valuable than gold. But when people take to stealing, then the economy STOPS.
[BTW, I'm happy to forgive any and all thieves, including SCO, Microsoft, Paypal, any Linux developers who stole code from SCO, and others. Someone want to let me know when the thieves are happy to stop stealing?]
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'm not arguing with your main point here, but praise and acknowledgement suck monkey balls. I'm generally "acknowledged" as one of the best at my job in my department, sometimes I'm told I'm the best. I'm "praised" when I find/fix a problem that nobody else could figure out. It hasn't gotten me jack or shit.
I used to get all warm and fuzzy inside over it, but after two years of getting the "maximum" raise of 4% plus the general 3% cost of living raise, I'm about sick and tired of praise and acknowledgement. As a matter of fact, I wish I didn't get either, since it's become annoying to me that I have to pretend to give a fuck. If I didn't, my psychotic managers would start screwing me over at every opportunity because their feelings would be hurt, and I would actually end up being penalized for doing a better job than 98% of the people I work with!
Fuck praise and acknowledgement, fuck them in their stupid asses. Show me the money, and stop making me work 'till midnight on Friday.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Have you read the GPL text?
We hang the petty thieves, but appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
That answer is in Don Lancaster's "Incredible Secret Money Machine":
(1) start writing magazine articles, all along as you go. Get those magazine articles published in a journal [that's pay right there.]
(2) All along, as you produce magazine articles, make sure your magazine articles give away real secrets, but not the most valuable ones -- just hint at where the answers are for those. That's your advertising. When companies call with questions, CONSULT. [More money].
(3) Not all your eggs go in one basket. Teaching at a community college can be very helpful. [More Money!] Watch where the market takes you, and work first on the stuff that pays. [That's where the money is].
(4) Live cheap, not expensively. Don't get an expensive studio -- use a shed. Every dollar saved is like $2 or more, earned, when you count taxes, expenses, and whatnot. [Like more money]. Also, no SB loans! [Unless you want to work for the bank, and wind up homeless].
(5) When you have enough magazine articles, rework slightly to make uniform and publish in book format. More money.
That's all I remember offhand right now, but that's the gist of the book. My experience is that insofar as I follow that formula, it's a pretty good formula. I'm not able to follow it 100%, but you won't be able to either. This is just a general roadmap.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Theres another very similar, also free, also GPL'd, also linux network-devices-on-a-disk project called Sisela, available here.
It looks fairly promising, though I've never used it or LRP.
just to say i'd mod you up if I had any points :)
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
Most of the information and development was on the unofficial c0wz website (those involved with LRP know which site I'm talking about). But that site went down around the time LEAF started. Every once in a while I run accross an old mirror of the c0wz website, which still has the best collection of networking links and information IMHO.
One thing people don't realize is that if they don't have the time or energy for a project, they need to hand it off to someone else. Otherwise everyone will jump ship and start a new project (see LEAF) and leave the original developer with nothing more than a dead project and a few memories. When something a popular as LRP dies, it's not because of a lack of interest from the community, it's because of a lack of interest, direction, and leadership from the original developer. The LRP would continue on if the original developer would learn to just let go...
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
That says it all. If you aren't willing to move to where your jobs are, you going to have to start cleaning out sh*t holes.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
LRP was a good alternative when we were given the choice between blowing a couple grand on a new router or using LRP with an obsolete PC that nobody at the office wanted to use. Cheap PC + labor to get LRP configured was less than what it would have cost us to bring a real router.
The problem is that is not the case anymore. Our new T1 here uses a $500 netopia router that took just a few hours to get setup properly (this was mostly due to poor implementation support, we were promised the telco would configure the router and we would only have to plug it in). Even with the trouble we had I would not hesitate to use that kind of router again, instead of trying to build one from scratch with something like LRP.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
OK, so it is tough luck that your GPL project didn't bring you wheelbarrowloads of cash
If that's what you wanted, you played in the wrong court.
OK, so it sucks that you can't find a job in your chosen profession (I know, I have been facing the same problem, and have been delivering packages while I SHOULD be examining packets. Do you hear me bitch about it? Only when I am drunk and/or trolling on slashdot *grin*)
but then to turn around and kill the project dead, saying 'I got a new version but I am not gonna share/release it because you owe me and I am a bitter man'???
Dude, get over yourself!
I don't know how complex this LRP is but I hacked together a debian box with three network cards and had it up and running as a router in 30 minutes, and for the last 3 YEARS it has been running uninterrupted.
Did I expect payment from my roomies for enabling them to access the internet?
No, but it did earn me massive kudo's (and, unbeknownst to them, the right to ipchains -j DENY any kazaa session other than mine *g*)
But I digress.
Release the code, drop those bitter feelings and your next job interview might actually go well.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
It is the same guy. He has been a nutcase for years. If I had realized that Dave 'kill a cop' Cinege was the force behind the Linux Router Project, I would have never used it. He was the first person I encountered on usenet that convinced me of two things:
1 - He is more than a little unstable.
2 - The internet can be a dangerous place.
Don't worry Dave, if you can't find work then someone, somewhere is holding a padded cell just for you.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
For those who want to roll their own linux router floppy see Linux on a floppy HOWTO
Reading Dave Cinege's sad words on linuxrouter.org does not reflect a fundamental flaw of open source development any more than hearing a friend agonizing about breaking up with his girldfriend reflects a fundamental flaw of love.
I hate to point it out, but his personal domain is 'psychosis.com'.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
> It's always interesting when your apache processes jump from 5 to 152...
Yeah - interesting that you didn't bother to consider the possibility of the 1:N nature of the Internet working in reverse when you configured the webserver.
The Open/Free Software movement is not about making a living creating software. Unless you are a government dependant employee or student (the same thing for many), Free Software is Part-Time-Software. Some choose to be Professional Software creators to make a living. It is still a noble profession regardless of what one may read on /. or in marxism class.
The problem always is though, the sacrifice, in this case the investment and faith in his own ideas, and running the parts of any possible business that he didn't want to run.
You can do it, it can be done. The difference is wether you sit around for 6 years with half an idea hoping somebody cuts you a check, or wether you go out and apply yourself to actually make the money you want.
I work for myself. I have to do all sorts of whorelike things that are against my nature, like sales, and accounting, and marketing, and talking to other human beings that may or may not have beards and may or may not believe in the merits GPL.
He was waiting for somebody to notice? Sorry, no sympathy. Stop waiting. Pick it up, suck it up. He's obviously more than capable.
Hire yourself buddy! ..ok, coffee induced rant over.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
There was no C&D letter or DMCA threat involved, for once.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
You know, I've heard about guys like this, but I've never actually met one, or (knowingly) used any of their software.
Frightening... "technically" a convicted felon? Car chases? "Kill a cop"? Now, all the evidence we have on this is a few Usenet posts... anyone in the Tampa/St. Pete area care to verify that this is the same guy? If he's a felon, there's gotta be a public record of such.
And this guy is writing software I've actually explored using? We've got some unconventional thinkers in the Free Software movement, but I've never seen anything like this.
You know, you have freedom of speech in America, but you don't have freedom from other people's opinion of your speech. This is particularly important if you are dependant on the goodwill of others, or the public, for your livelihood (Helloooo Hollywood... Garafolo, Penn, et al). If you were an employer, would you employ an openly a radical Klansman, or a government-hating radical that advocates violence?
The answer is not only "No," it's "Hell no."
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Ok, sure I feel sorry for him, BUT...
You should build GPL stuff either to scratch your own itch or for the pure fun of it. You release it as GPL in the hope that others will improve your work and in THAT way you get something back.
Sure, would be nice if companies gave more back. On the other hand, if Redhat gave out jobs to everybody who wrote something included in their distribution, they would have hundreds of thousands on the payroll.
There are tons of things I'd like to write and get paid to give it away. If I want to do that, I'll have to find a company who'll do it.
Also looks like this guy bit off more than he could chew. A new shell? To do right, that's a tough job. A new packaging system? It's hard for one guy to change the world. Linus was lucky. Not everyone will be.
Methinks maybe he decided he couldn't do it, and is now trying to blame his problems on something other than his own lack of ability.
I think the same thing. He sounds a lot like Derek Smart to me.
How successful can a project be when the leader is so bitter (after 6 months, no less). ThatÂs all fine and good that heÂs been hard at work coding, but if he comes off as bitter (which he does in this letter), then nobodyÂs going to want to deal with him.
Sad.
It is simply easier to run down to Circuit City and pick up a Netgear or Linksys Appliance for less than a hundred bucks. For that I'll get a little appliance that I can plug in somewhere and utterly forget for the next however long it lasts.
The project is a victim of its own success.
I for one, wish him the best of luck and a new job.
Newsfollow.com
Just thought I would throw in a quick plug for m0n0wall, a linux based firewall that I use.. it is 5mb in size and can run from a HD, an CD and FD combo, or a CF card. With a nice looking web based front end. Also has support for NAT, wireless, a DHCP server, ummm lots of other stuff. m0n0wall site is here if you want more info.
It seems that CF cards are the next thing for the mini-OS's at the moment. Quiet, low power, starting at around 3x the cost of a FDD for about 50 times the space (64mb card).
- Chuq
So exactly what the hell have you been eating that takes more than a 'few thousand dollars' a month?
Use e-gold. You can accept payments having a link like http://123456.e-gold.com on your web page.
I can see perhaps one way he could have made money off the thing, and that would have been to collaborate with some hardware folk and come up with a more cheap dedicated router, same as the other router companies, put his distro in there, made it rugged, cheap, functional. Or gone to an embedded full distro, something that was secure in spades. People "out there" are certainly aware of security, they just are overwhelmed with how to go about it without become a full time security guru. It's a huge potential market, but I'm not seeing any major effort from any camp any place to provide it. Even the big computer vendors still don't get it, they have employees deal with their security, and wouldn't miss a thing if their box got borked, they have thousands more avaialable, whereas joe homeowner/user or small business guy is just...stuck. There just isn't a security first easy to use distro, not from anyone, open source, closed source, semi open and closed, you name it, none of them deliver.
Note, not saying it is entirely probable, but perhaps one avenue he could have explored.
As to the economy, yep, sucketh. I've had the same job over 4 years, I liked it, but it's time to move on, the boss gradually upped my workload and kept dropping the pay until now it's almost zero pay. One reason is that he as a businessman is a one trick pony, he is losing his shirt with his one type of business, whereas the new guy I'm going to work for runs 5 different businesses, all different from each other. As a consequence I've been looking around, I found this other job, pay might be very low, but the job itself looks more interesting, I get more on the side,and the provided tools are better. It will require an expensive move for me, but oh well, stuff happens. I do estate management/groundskeeping/maintenance. Physical labor, that's what makes me cash, hard work, mostly outside, dodging yellow jackets, chiggers, copperheads,poison ivy, humping rocks, running stinky machinery, fixing everything that breaks, a hundred and one jobs, for pretty dismal cash compared to salaries I see bandied about on slasherdotted. To ME, anyone who makes ANYTHING sitting around a climate controlled office is skilled and lucky,BOTH, so don't expect it to last forever, those sorts of jobs are sought after, and surprise, humans in other nations will do that work for less than you. They are also over valued almost every place, that's why cash keeps tightening. The US in particular is full of those sorts of jobs now, no wonder the economy is crashing slowly. Without some sort of locked down monopoly, it won't last and it couldn't have lasted.
Where the rubber meets the road, wealth has to be physically wrested from the ground,manufactured, and that's it. Bits and bytes need to be turned into something useful,by themselves they are bits and bytes and now the planet is awash in them, they are not as valuable as in the 60s and 70's and 80-s when few people could create them and there was more of a monopoly in their creation. IP styled work is the work that leads to the possibility of work that leads to wealth creation, it's a side issue. Anyone making full time check at that is lucky, as it's obvious it's shifting to off shore and becoming just a regular ho hum job, not an uberjob, and that's because it went from hundreds of people doing it one generation ago to now millions and millions with millions more school kids entering the market to "do it", to have a climate controlled office job of some sort.
I can have a huge stack of tools, they do nothing without picking them up and using them. Same with software, same with any other sort of job like that, someplace humans have to do the other work that provides goods and services. It's one way to get cash back out of the economy, you get it from people who have more than you but are unable or unwilling to do a lot of labor for themselves. And that's it, you have to provide something of value to get something back. As it becomes less valuable you'll get less pay. With software, downloadab
...since you obviously don't know how to use it.
Well gee! Fame isn't a recognized currency with an exchange rate and a central bank to back it up?
Well, I'll just have to throw this fame in the bin with talent, allure, shrewdness, ingenuity, dexterity because I can't get a lousy exchange rate at the local bank.
What am I going to do?
Seriously, aren't you in the business of converting your trolls into clicks and those clicks into currency?
I'd figure if a guy like you can convert trolls into currency, you'd have no trouble with exploiting fame.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
" A new shell (no bash, no ash, no sh at all!) A new shell scripting language A new (universal) packaging scheme (would retrofit other OSes) A true application management system A new core process management system (No 'init' here...) " When you set out to change this much you're bound to run into frustration. Start small, release often.
TT
I agree 100%.
LEAF kicks ass by the way. For a long time I've been using the Bering release for several firewalls.
LRP was dead long ago.
I don't know all of the details here, just what he posted on the LRP site but...
If you are doing this type of thing with the expectation of making a living then you are running a business. If you are running a business then you had better take care of business. This means taking care of a bunch of things that geeks donâ(TM)t like to have to worry about.
It is tough. I'm a geek and I love what I do but I am always juggling my dreams and intellectual interests with the demands of life. My wife and I aren't super materialistic but we have a fairly nice house, like to drive reliable cars, etc. It all takes money. Not a lot but enough that it doesnâ(TM)t just happen by accident.
There are a lot of intellectually challenging things that I would love to do but I can't figure out how to make it work financially. In a lot of ways I respect his ability to forego financial gratification and pursue his dreams but I do think it is foolish to pour time into a project without some sort of plan for taking care of you. If you arenâ(TM)t attending to your business nobody else is going to.
He should have at least had some sort of business plan or plans that would result in him meeting his other life goals in addition to his intellectual pursuits. Thatâ(TM)s just the way life is whether you think it is a good thing or not. Pretty much everyone else on the planet is doing the same thing.
Free software isnâ(TM)t really free. It takes people who have invested a lot of time and money in their education, computers, electricity, a roof over your head. This all adds up.
So, I guess this sort of thing happens all the time. Geek enjoys programming and computers wants to leave his/her mark on the world. Works on project at the neglect of other things, then gets pissed off because the other things werenâ(TM)t taken care of.
... you might have noticed this:
LRP == R.I.P. (1997-2002)
5 yrs is his lifes work? LRP was an awesome project no doubt, but I agree with the previous that this guy is whining and immature. I put 5 years into it and I still don't drive a jag....WAA.
The only difference in this regard between BSD, Artistic, and plain old public domain is that with the GPL, you see the changes others make. With any other license, you may never even know what projects or to what purposes it has been ported and how it has changed.
So tell us, why do you hate the GPL so much? Because it forces honesty?
Infuriate left and right
available on /., no less
I must say that I am not a fan of these floppy-based routers. Essentially, you are taking one of the most unreliable pieces of storage known to man, and trying to build security infrastructure on it. That's madness. Just buy a small disk. Perhaps somethings based on a CD plus some other (non-floppy) persistant storage might be sane. But please. Not floppies. Are you mad?
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Tell me, please, how the GPL differs here from any other free source license. With all of them, anybody can make changes. Whether GPL, BSD or public domain, you have allowed others to make changes to your code base. The only difference I see is that with the GPL, you get to see their changes. The others all hide it under the rug.
Seems to me this says a whole lot more about you and what you want to know than it does about the licenses.
Infuriate left and right
php dev mailing list (php is bsd based)
due to the "virality" of the GPL they exclude the mysql library from php.
The real free license is BSD based , but there other people can walk away with your work.
The biggest mistake I made when I became a consultant was to not learn about business before I took the plunge, and to not adequately take care of my business once I committed to it.
I became a consultant because I was a good programmer, wanted to be my own boss and wanted to work out of my home, not because I had any love of or aptitude for business. The importance of taking care of business has been a hard lesson to learn.
There is bookkeeping, accounting (two related but different things), tax filing, sales, marketing, contract negotations, billing, and, uh "encouraging" the client to actually pay, collections when that doesn't work, and time management.
None of these come naturally to most geeks, not even when you're a skilled and talented programmer.
I guess this Dave guy just tossed an Open Source project out into the wild and expected the checks to start appearing in his mailbox. Even under the best circumstances, it's much more complicated than that.
I started my consulting business full-time on April 1, 1998. I'm only just beginning to get a handle on the business issues.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Why is this post marked as Insightful? There's no reason why people should feel that the work they do ought to be done for free. To be honest, if I coded MySQL, I would want a return on all the blood and sweat, especially once the monied companies that can afford it start using it for free. It's not like IBM couldn't afford a license for MySQL... Why is the GPL God? I like GPL software, but I don't think there is anything wrong with me using my brain to build something from scratch and then expecting others who want it to pay me for it. That is what separates men from monkies, you Troll.
Frank
"Other bands play, but Manowar KILLS"
Dave, I think some of the other folks have it right.
LRP is useful, and made a huge contribution to bringing Linux to the embedded world. Had it not been for LRP, it is possible that MS would have hooks in far more software than it does, via CE, and Linux wouldn't be making nearly as many waves as it does in business publications.
However, you cannot let something like this turn into something that consumes all your time and energy. It cannot be more than a hobby, unless you have some way ahead of time to convert it into money.
My guess is that you spent a lot of time working on this, and expected to be able to "cash in" the fame at some point to get a decent job (with Caldera or whomever). Not unreasonable, and a lot of GPL folks feel the same way. But it's a bad market for tech folks right now (or at least less good than it was), and it didn't turn out that way. Even Linus, who has a tremendous amount of fame stored up, worked for years for Transmeta and on other things before actually becoming bankrolled by a company.
You can *always* get a job. It may not be a great job. It may pay $30k. It may be working at a Babbages. If you have technical skills, you can at least put food on the table. You may be better off lowering your standards, getting a job that doesn't pay too much (and thus eating and having something to do all day), waiting out the recession, and then run out and look for a better job. There are a lot of folks that can't find a decent job now. That's just part of tech life right now.
Thank you for your code.
Finally, you should take the people poking on you here only semi-seriously. Slashdotters love actually being able to affect something by typing, regardless of the actual impact. If it's to piss some guy off who is already pretty upset, then they'll do it.
P.S. From a technical standpont, I agree with a few other people -- I think your final set of ideas may be too ambitious to do well. It takes a tremendous amount of work to write a good interpreter and good language, and the same goes for an OS and support utilities. I'd hold off on that, since it's such a huge project. It may be good if you're willing to wait until retirement or something like that, but in the meantime, it's a tremendous undertaking.
May we never see th
That's what they are for: to prevent companies from productizing your work and making $$$ without you getting anything back.
So he did he finally get around to legally changing his name to Linux Torvalds! I knew if would happen eventually. Now if only he could change that "Torvalds" to something catchier and sexier... perhaps "de Beaumarche".
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
What I did was consult for a little while in between perm jobs, or do consulting work on nights and weekends while I had perm jobs. That gave me an opportunity to learn the ropes with less risk.
What finally convinced me to take the plunge was that I was good and sick of working for somebody else. If I'd had any sense I would have stuck it out longer while getting myself in a better position to do consulting sustainably. But I just couldn't take it anymore. Having to survive by my own wits was the kick in my pants I needed to overcome a long period of burnout.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
LRP Was superceded by LEAF!
Typical slashdot- react but not know anything of the facts first.
LRP died a long time ago because Deisel "Kill a Cop" Dave Cinege replaced the LRP home page with a tribute to Tim McVeigh on the day of his execution. I can recall the day as hundreds and hundreds of LRP mailing list subscribers announced in disgust that they were outa there.
Dave got precicely what he deserves- his psychotic, cop-and-government-hating paranoia cost him his LRP sponsorships, his IT jobs, and any modicum of respect from the greater community.
Burn in it, Dave, Burn!
Everyone that was anyone involved with the LRP project basically forked the effort and now live on as LEAF.
leaf.sourceforge.net
Who moderated this turd funny???
LILO follows an outdated, broken concept and should once and for all
be layed to rest, preferably with a stake through it's heart.
-- Dave Cinege, linux-kernel mailing list
yikes.
The thing you can get from doing GPL'd work is a reputation, and that can be a very valuable commodity. If you go into an interview able to say that you contribute code to the Linux kernel and Apache on a routine basis, you're going to look like somebody who can actually do the job. Not only that, but the employer could even go look at the work you did, which is likely impossible with closed source software you would write for a regular job.
More and more, I suspect these kinds of credentials are going to get you further as a technician than a college degree is. Who would you rather higher:
1) somebody fresh out of college, with a glowing recommendation from his professor?
2) somebody who dropped out of college, but has been an active participant in some open source projects?
Sure, the first one has a degree and a recommendation, but it's unclear how well that translates into actually doing a good job as a developer. On the other hand, with the second one, you could actually go look at what this guy is doing. You can check mailing lists from the project and see how he interacts with his peers. Is he condescending and aloof, or does he do a great job of collaborating? That's probably more effort to research a job candidate than one would want to do at the initial interview, but if they've got it narrowed down to a couple of choices, it can certainly help give a hiring manager confidence in their decision.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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LRP, not it's variants, has been practically dead for a loooooong, long time. Even tho I can't get to the /.-ted page right now, I assume this is just a formal burial for a great, albeit recently stagnant, project. I salute Dave Cinege, and let it be known that his efforts did not go in vain - I am writing this from behind a firewall spawned by LRP.
Must-not-watch TV!
Dear Sniveling Brat:
So you couldn't hack it as an Open Source hacker. Too fucking bad. Why do you feel these companies are entitled to give you ONE cent? You're the one that released your stuff under GPL, you only have yourself to blame. You either get to profit from your code, or release it to the world -- not both.
That being said, you're also unrealistic. The goals you laid out for your system are totally unreasonable! Why waste your time writing things that have been written already? How would you plan to have a universal packaging system when different distributions put files in different places?
If you want to do something that really benefits the community, GET OVER YOURSELF. Obviously you're not the uber-haxor you thought you were -- it sucks to realize that, but it happens to everyone.
Seeya! Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
The comments are starting to die out... you should remove the title "Linux Router Project Dead" and replace it with "Dave Cinege Character Assassination Free-For-All"... that should liven things up a bit.
Not my post, but what the guy said seemed reasonable. So either I have a 5th grade education, or you seem to be trolling yourself. Either way, it's an interesting thread, so it would be nice if you actually would breakdown what you call his "FUD."
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I feel the same way, and I have been doing it for 14 years so far. Treat it like a career, deal with management on their level, don't back down over compensation and benefits, document like a mofo, and you can wind up making $97k and working 50 hours a week, with the long days infrequent and 18 working days of vacation in addition to the normal 2 weeks and personal days. I like what I do. The first five years sucked, then I started treating it the same way the management types did, as a long term deal. If you cannot deal with management, you will tend to get shafted. Always have enough money in the bank to walk away, be firm from day 1 about what you will and will not do, and take vacation instead of salary -- it worked for me so far.
Fuck praise and acknowledgement, fuck them in their stupid asses. Show me the money, and stop making me work 'till midnight on Friday.
Hi! You are on the fast road to burnout. In my experience, if you don't change things so that you are happy enough that you can start recovering the enjoyment you used to find in your work, you will end up hating utterly both the work and the job, so much so that even years later the thought of doing the work will make your stomach lurch like biting into rotten meat.
It sounds like you feel like you are doing far more than they are paying you for. Bring that back into balance. The right way depends on the situation, but do it pronto or you'll end up quitting in a huff or getting fired for being surly.
If you want to know more, ask here or drop me a private email.
>Your P90 would be melted faster than the quickest slasdotting trying to deal with 320Gbps.
I don't think any one has suggested a P90 for that purpose, so it'd probably an unfair comparison. A much better comparison is can it handle your broadband connection, or a full 100-mbit workgroup? I don't know that P90 can manage that (I'd be impressed) but you never know...
But you do mention PC routers are good for small routing tasks at least.
Not just "small" tasks but "special" ones also... lot of people forget that VPN-enabled CISCO's are *expensive* -- other Slashdotters are saying "routers are $50 at Walmart" which is BS when you need VPN, etc.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, Mr. Cinege unilaterally declared himself the "official" maintainer of portslave when I refused to blindly accept any patches he sent (which he did not create himself; the LRP was mostly, I believe, created from other people's work). He then added some very unprintable comments to his
This guy was and is a raving loon. I think his website posting is a plea for attention so he can feel more like part of the down-trodden anti-microsoft Linux-using masses, and because he thinks the world owes him a living, and wants charity.
I pity the next person who gives him a job.
If he was hit by a car tomorrow, I'd be worried that the car was damaged.
Am I being clear enough on my feelings here?
Erik
Guys, I just heard on the radio that the Linux Router Project is dead...
;)
You know the rest.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
The days when people didn't take free software for granted are gone. And that's too bad. Some people just think that somehow they are entitled to Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, Perl, Python, etc, etc. And I bet they claim to be "open source supporters" without ever contributing a line of code, just by virtue of using Apache or something.
On the other hand there is a definite trend developing where people who are able to write software are much more cautious about giving it away. And I actually think that's healthy, because contrary to what some may be delusional about, existence of free software is not a fact of nature, it is a result of someone's hard work and generosity.
And don't buy this bull that writing free software pays in fame or whatever. I have little respect for people who say things like this.
grisha.org
Here, Here...
Words of wisdom... Finally.
There, there? I think what you mean is "Hear, hear".
Enigma
make no mistake about it
Ugh. That phrase still gives me chills. How about "let's look at what we know".
There is definitely *value* in building a solid online rep (and more and more employers are googling interviewees), and you can improve your skills, which may help you land that job... but in today's world fame is still NOT bankable.
Some employers will be encouraged by your thriving OSS project.. and some will simply see it as a massive leech sucking away your productive time (which, in all honesty, might be true).
Paychecks from a solvent company are bankable. I think it's great when we can do both, but it's simply not worth it for everyone.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Not bringing in enough money to put food on the table?!
You, sir, are a moron!
Yes, you've read it right, a Moron
FIRST you should have put a ton of banner-ads on your website and THEN blown your top over your personal misgivings.
Too stupid to think of even such a simple way to get ca$h to flow.
Heh!
Moron
Free ?! Does that mean I can't get a Discount ?!
This message was
Whereas what chance of ever building your own router if you had to build the kernel from scratch as well?
No-one is indispensible.
I have found that in my own pet project (a fork of someone else's but semi popular in it's own right) few if any users are willing to contribute code. Perhaps this is because the project has such a narrow focus. I personally have not even considered contributing to something like the kernel but I use each release. Sometimes it is easier to not dig into the code and never contribute. I guess if you follow ESR's theory on scratching itches- it has to be a really big itch to get people moving.
I have a project to create a single floppy OpenBSD based firewall. FOAF http://theapt.org/openbsd/foaf.html . It works for me(tm) and is currently protecting my home network. I think other people are using it for their home networks, but no-one has told me such.
Just another alternative. BSD and MIT licensed. =)
Amen brother! You can still find most of the thread in the newsgroups. What a whack-job that guy was. Made DJB seem almost reasonable...
Damn. Corporations suck. They take all the money away from the godo open source projects. After all, there is no reason in this day and age that anyone should be selling software. The real money maker these days is original data. However, the suits just don't get it. That's because they still don't get computers. At best they are "armchair admins" who watch TechTV and install tons of utilities on their PCs to make them feel big. At worst, they are just profit junkies who think that the bottom line of a company sucks unless THEY are making multimillion dollar salaries... the real techs beneath them be damned. Sorry, but a sys admin should be making in the neighborhood of $60-80,000 a year. A DBA should be making $500,000 a year and suits should be in the $40-50,000 range. Why? Because suits don't do any real work at all. The only thing they do is get in the way. They are middlemen. That's where the US and most of the rest of the capitalist drive n world is: It's "Attack of the Middlemen" everyday. The people with absolutely no skills at all, but they have to try and control everything. And they do a miserable job at that as well. Fucking losers.
So when someone says you can't make money with the GPL and therefore the GPL is bad, you get a 1000 posts saying how you CAN make money.
Now when somone really doesn't make money, everyone yells at him saying that's not what the GPL is for. Of course, it's probably not the same people posting the differing views.
The take home message? Don't blindly trust anything you read on slashdot. The GPL really doesn't make you any money. No matter what you say bad about the GPL, you will get flamed.
There's a very nice summary of social contract theory in the opening of the American Declaration of Independence. Locke's Second Treatise on Government goes into much greater depth.
As an employer, I can say "hell, yes". I'd hire
Cinege, Garofolo and Penn long before I'd hire a
simpering running dog lackey of murdering fascists
such as you. I'm sure you'd rat your grandma to
the Red Guards. Cinege would have the backbone to
cap a few before they took him down.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
"I don't care if Michael Jackson came into my store. He's still gotta pay with cash, check, or major credit card."
If Jackson came in to your store his fame would not only be enough to purchase your product, you would pay him lots of money to take your product.
Depending on what you sell of course. If you sold child safety seats you might be better served by a different celeb, but if you sold skin bleach your business would sky rocket.
Fame isn't cash, but you can cash in on it. Sadly for Mr. T, you don't always get your money's worth.
WTF is wrong with this guy? He's just announcing the project DEAD, just like that? Does he not want someone else to take it over? I mean come on, wasn't it an open source project? And he must be doing something wrong if he can't put food on the table. He should have sold Linux routers :)
I'm not drunk, I'm just in touch with pi.
(sniff!, snuffle!) I will miss you. I learned NAT playing with LRP.
Someone give that guy a donation! What a shame to see such a useful project die. If you are running an LRP router and haven't donated, please send the guy something, even if it is only $5. We need an outpouring for the guy...
I am getting out my checkbook...
Should have done it sooner.
l8,
AC
If I had realized that Dave 'kill a cop' Cinege was the force behind the Linux Router Project, I would have never used it.
Stupid. What does the world gain from you not using his code?
I've always thought one of the beauties of open source was that people with completely different political and religious ideals could still share code. There are no sinister spiritual (or terrorist) forces hidden in that header file. Just function declarations. Really.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Well then... now's your chance. Judging by the LRP website, I think Cinege would welcome your offer of employment.
I have libertarian sympathies myself... but I've sure as hell never led cops on a 2-county chase, or exhorted people to kill police officers. That's just a bit out of bounds, I'd say... but maybe it's just me. Then again, if you so passionately share Cinege's views, then maybe you two could get together and do a Thelma and Louise thing.
"Cap a few before they took him down"... well, if that's your best hope for your political fellows, you're probably not to win much popular support.
I've nothing personal against the militia types... in fact, I'm glad they feel strongly about their rights, and I hope every one of them goes to the ballot box (hopefully BEFORE they reach for the ammo box).
"Simpering running dog lackey of murdering fascists" *Laughing* Wow... that's quite a poison pen you have there! You've really tickled my funny bone... thank you.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Say "Hi!" to the GPLed 15 years old moderator who has never seen anything beside linux.
Those are high-ego goals:
I can make it all over from scratch better than anyone else ever has....
Hey! how come no one will pay me to work on my pet project with my own goals?
Sorry, I guess reality hit him hard.
Here's what really piques my ire about this
thread: Cinege's critics are essentially
demonizing stalkers who raise irrelevancies
in order to conduct ad hominem attacks.
He could be Jeffrey Dahmer in drag or the
last remaining clone of der Fuhrer, and it
wouldn't make one bit of difference relative
to the truth or falsity of his statements.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
That reminds me of a Kids in the Hall skit.
I've seen it happen to a number of people. The economey has gone to hell, they can't get enough money to live (esp in Florida - have you seen the cost of living there), and when they can't go any further they flip out. I say lets go easy on they guy, would we do this to a guy thrashing and splahing drowning in a pool, I'd be willing to bet that once things stabilize - he'll be back to codeing on the LRP, and a lot more wiser.
Lets just fce it, people can do everything right and still get nailed. It's just the way the world is, capitalist or not - at this point of course he's fusterated, burnt out, at the end of his rope. And I hate to say it, but things will probably get worse before they get better. However, I too don't think he should regret his efforts - whether he can put cash in the bank right now or not, he still did himself a favor that will have positive long term consequences.
Dave,
I read your rant, and you're complaining about people not sending you money.
OK, you claim to have received about $100,000 for the LRP over 6 years.
How much of that have you sent to the kernel, GCC, and BusyBox authors and contributors?
Seems like you're bitching about people "making money off your hard work", while you're guilty of doing exactly the same thing.
I just thought I should mention that the Leaf project which I believe is a derivative work (or at least inspired by it) is going very strong. Check it out at:
http://leaf.sourceforge.net/
It also provides floppy, cdrom or flash based linux routers and firewalls.
Just thought you should know.
George W. Bush says ...
H-1B PRESS RELEASE
STATEMENT BY GOVERNOR GEORGE W. BUSH ON
THE CLINTON-GORE ADMINISTRATION'S REFUSAL
TO RAISE THE H1-B IMMIGRANT VISA CAP
"America has the best industries in the world. And that means we need the best workers
in the world. By failing to support legislation to increase the number of highly-skilled,
highly-trained immigrants, the Clinton-Gore administration is standing in the way of
continued economic growth.
"I urge the administration to unequivocally support bipartisan efforts in Congress to raise
the number of highly-skilled, highly-trained immigrants who can enter the country each
year. By increasing the number of these H1-B Visas, we can increase the chances that
our economy will continue to grow.
LEAF and the literly dozens of other off shoots used the LRP os as their base and then added enhancements mostly via the way of application specific extenstions. I've yet to see any major revamping of the OS itself by anyone else...only upgrades to newer componets. (kernel, busybox, etc...)
My discontent with all of them is LRP had a modular packaging system, and instead of re-releasing the the whole works with a specialized purpose, they could have released *packages*! This would have greatly help the progress of LRP itself.
You will notice there is no 'LEAF OS'. There are like 5 sub-versions on a LEAF site based on the original LRP OS.
For the most part they did the equivelent of re-releasing Debian instead of creating a '.deb'. Saying LEAF or any of the other direivatives continued the work of LRP is like saying, Tivo continued the work of Redhat. Their goals were very specific, LEAF in particular, to maintain a firewall on a floppy. LRP, name aside (it WAS to be renamed), had the goal of becoming a next generation, general purpose OS, with a highly refined and embedalbe micro core.
Dave
for those of you, who are GPL-doesnt-makes-me-earn-money i must say that in the moment you decide to release your work to the world, you have the right to choose in which form you do it, so if you don't like GPL use another license, if you want to earn money make it in some way that allows to, but don't blame GPL for not making money, since licenses aren't something meant to make you earn money, they are meant to specify the terms under your work is done and how you want it to be used.
you can make profit of a GPL'ed software, don't expect to get profit just releasing something (under any kind of license) if you want profit do something to earn it, it doesn't come just like rain!
regards
sTone_heAd
So, yeah, the copyright holder retains full control, just so long as what that copyright holder wants is for the whole world to have free access to the source code of his or her work and is free to do whatever they wish with it.
I think you may be missing one important point. The author of the code is the only person in the world *not* bound by the GPL. That is, she can distribute the binaries without giving out source code, and she can sell people the right to distribute binaries and derivative works without having to give out the source code.
Let's say company A wants to extend some open-source project, intending to make a proprietary distribution which they plan to sell. Perhaps they see the popularity of the open-source version, but also see some major improvements for which there may be a market. Company A may be willing to pay the author for the rights to distribute the code under some license other than the GPL. In this case, it was the author's decision to GPL the code which led to it's widespread popularity, and then to the money making opportunity for the author.
IANAL, and I would be quick to concede that this scenario is probably rare. The point is tough, the author's copyright on the work is not worthless once the work is GPL'd.
While he did a lot of good work, and spawned some nice projects to pick up the path he doesn't have to whine about it.
Seesh, it was a 'free' project.. only a fool would expect it to 'put food on the table'.
Its all part of the deal of donating your time to the 'cause'.. its a DONATION.. nothing more, nothing less. Be thankful for the complements and loose change people send you. ( and get a real job on the side to support the family during the project ).
---- Booth was a patriot ----
as a plumber. It's not an unrespectable line of work. Just wear a belt or something.
Yes, your point is valid; of course he could be right... and he could be wrong.
The problem is one of public perception, which, like it or not, we must take into consideration. Any entity that does business with the general public depends on the goodwill of that public for survival; to say otherwise is to deny reality. Unfortunatly, Mr. Cinege apparently made his political views a large part of who he is, and what he does... and opened the door to criticism as a result. Business is business, and it really should be kept on that level to avoid the unnecessary consequences of fringe political advocacy.
Yes, he could be right... but he drew his criticism with his own radical statements, and has called the validity of his views into question in some people's minds, because they are considering the source. They see the messenger, rather than the message. Unfortunate, but such is human nature.
A raving, drooling, psychotic nutcase could be spot-on, but nobody listens to such a spokesman, so the intellectual battle is lost before it's even begun.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I read somewhere that over 90% of all business startups fail. Everything EXCEPT Office is loosing money for Microsoft, and if it weren't for their monopoly, which allowed 87% profit margins, they would be history too. So, why does it make news when a GPL project dies?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Samba is also used to share printers. I believe this is what the poster was suggesting
> he drew his criticism with his own radical statements
...huh?
This from the person who signs his posts with
> Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
But yeah, honesty is subversive, without a doubt.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
At least with the GPL the author will be acknowledged (in the code) and the source code will be distributed.
With BSD-style licenses, commercial companies can use your code without having to distribute the source. Your hard work can then be used by a company to profit without any acknowledgement of the true author of the code.
On 6/11, Dave took down the LRP servers, and put up a web page instead saying that
LRP was in mourning for the execution of a "prisoner of war" - i.e., Tim
McVeigh, who was executed for killing 168 federal employees and
children in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Great book: "The Millionaire Next Door." Check it out of the library next chance you get. The author studied hundreds of people with high net assets and found that a very high proportion created their own very unglamorous businesses, live pretty modestly, and take well-calculated risks. All very interesting.
The LRP guy did seem to be investing his energy into some things that wouldn't offer much return for his efforts:
* A new shell (no bash, no ash, no sh at all!)
* A new shell scripting language
Do you really need a new shell and scripting language for this sort of thing? It probably would have been better to put that effort into other areas.
The GPL does not prevent you from selling the same code you own under a proprietary license. This is exactly the same as any other license. No difference.
The original poster was complaining that having given away his code, he could not expect anything in return -- Not a salary, not an occasional trip, not even acknowledgement. There is no difference here between the GPL and other licenses. Once you've shown the code, you've shown the code. You'll have exactly the same problem making money from the GPL'd code as code released under any other license, since you are the copyright owner.
Now if you get GPL code from somebody else, things are different, and I see it as a good difference. If I release code under the GPL, I am the only one who can also release it under a proprietary license and make money from it. With other licenses, anybody down the chain can make money.
Infuriate left and right
I think your pretty dead-on. But I think open source software's weaknesses could also be its strengths.
Well designed UI's are something I'd gladly shell out money for. I use a system based entirely on open source software and every couple of days I nearly pull out my own hair. I'd like to see open source developers start to mix licenses more so that users *could* support them and in exchange get commercial style support and interfaces.
I think the time of free software is starting to pass and as the movement matures maybe we can focus on open source and be more willing to pay developers to develop.
Quack, quack.
Is this in any case related to the following software?
http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw
Heheheh... I've used that as my sig for years, even professionally (I am a physician)... it's an old martial arts proverb (from the Kendo discipline) that I heard from one of my instructors (and he heard from one of his instructors).
The underlying message is "don't ever give up," but you're right... it does raise eyebrows. Touche`
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Okay, now I read the article. I hope it didn't come off that I was pissing in this guy's Wheaties. I know he put in a lot of hard work and had big dreams and is now obviously disillusioned and burnt out. I've been there and it sucks to be there.
.
That's another interesting aspect of open source projects. When a respected project leader burns out their disappointment and dejection can be made very public.
And I haven't read much about his project but he either has done or planned to do much more coding than "simply a specialized Linux distribution". (I never seem to give these guys enough credit.)
I hate to see a guy burn out like that, and I wouldn't make a point to tell him right now (no point in kicking a man when he's down), but these things can and do happen. The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, . . .
See?
That's why there's significantly less economic incentive for conventional software businesses to create GPL'd products or use GPL'd technologies in derivative works. Businessmen have an emotional need to control their product.
Profiting on GPL'd software is pretty difficult. You can be a software maker, and just earn profits pedddling your wares, but you risk someone altering your product then profitting off of a new version.
Or you could be a service company and earn profits from supporting GPL'd products, but that is expensive. There are so many fixed and variable costs to deal with. And some companies just want to be the software maker.
You could also be a mixture of the two. I think Slackware and RedHat are great respective examples of these models. You slashdotters out there will know more than I; are there any other solid business models out there for GPL'd software?
http://bennett.senate.gov/senate_votes_to_raise_ca p_on_h.html
.
.
.
Both the Dem's and the Repub's are just as guilty
I am neither a Dem or a Repub because they are both
so utterly bought off they are merely puppets
91-1 means the Dem's in 1999 voted for it too Amigo
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Don't even expect that. I released a little game that I made as an exercise, and it was downloaded about 1,500 times over two versions. It got 7 comments on Versiontracker, and I got maybe three or four email with kind and appreciated words. I'm not at all bitter about it, because I got what I wanted (a programming exercise in a new platform), but it's important not to expect a lot of expressed gratitude.
It's too bad that this person turned into an object lesson for:
- Release software for free
- ???
- Profit!
but as you said, he had unreasonable expectations. Besides, since his work is based on Linux, it would be interesting to know if he had forwarded a portion of the donations he received to the Linux kernel hackers.I haven't heard that much whining since the drive in my kids Playstation died.
After reading the LRP page three times I still don't see what this guys problem is. But I'm not suprised, he sounds like a ham radio operator. In ham radio you get these guys all the time who build repeaters or packet nodes and then one day they get all pissy and destroy what they built as if someone owed them.
I hope this guy will someday find some peace in his life.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
My quick look leads me to believe the following:
Devil Linux only boots from CD, while LEAF can do that or boot from a floppy.
Devil Linux has more features, and thus needs more memory (than a floppy-based LEAF at least).
Devil Linux uses the 2.4.x kernel, which is available in one of the LEAF branches, but is not the default LEAF version.
Anyone care to add to and/or correct this?
..wayne..
Why this fixation on GPL? I did just fine for years using "Freeware" (e.g., distributing everything, to include source, but retaining ownership, copyright, license).
Everyone could see it, even use it (for noncommercial purposes or whatever restraints I put on it), contribute to it. But if anyone figured out how to make money with it, they couldn't do that without my permission.
No problem, simple, easy.
So why this fixation on GPL? There are other ways to do these things. Sheesh.
Dave,
.tgz archive and work has and is being done to replace this format. 'apkg' has been available for years and 'is' far more capable than what 'lrpkg' ever has been. In fact, 'apkg' was released while David D. was working from the LRP lists and before the initialization of LEAF, so I would have to assume that you are aware of this.
I am a project member of LEAF and feel somewhat compelled to reply to your comments if you feel inclined to take the time to read them.
LEAF and the literly dozens of other off shoots used the LRP os as their base and then added enhancements mostly via the way of application specific extenstions. I've yet to see any major revamping of the OS itself by anyone else...only upgrades to newer componets. (kernel, busybox, etc...)
While this is true to some extent, much work has gone on beyond your base as well as Matthew Grant's work. Many of us made use of the LRP site's resources though you rarely (if ever) showed any indication of using any of our work or including any other developers in your personal work (which was "LRP" itself). There is little to
none of your code in David Douthitt's "Oxygen" project that has been reworked to necessitate only the kernel patches. The kernel patches do not work with a 2.4.x kernel and any variants using these newer kernels have written their own patches.
My discontent with all of them is LRP had a modular packaging system, and instead of re-releasing the the whole works with a specialized purpose, they could have released *packages*! This would have greatly help the progress of LRP itself.
True to an extent, this package format is little more than a
You will notice there is no 'LEAF OS'. There are like 5 sub-versions on a LEAF site based on the original LRP OS.
Which is the foundation of the LEAF project (found in the FAQ section). Rather LEAF is a project that promotes somewhat similar variants or OS's under an unbrella that encourages every release to do their own thing w/o needing to be constrined to approval by a single person such as LRP was. Many of our variants do still use a some of your base, but this is at a dead-end as far to the degree we could extend it and we are moving on as future development demands and this comment will not be true in any degree with near future releases.
For the most part they did the equivelent of re-releasing Debian instead of creating a '.deb'. Saying LEAF or any of the other direivatives continued the work of LRP is like saying, Tivo continued the work of Redhat. Their goals were very specific, LEAF in particular, to maintain a firewall on a floppy. LRP, name aside (it WAS to be renamed), had the goal of becoming a next generation, general purpose OS, with a highly refined and embedalbe micro core.
I think you will find this already done with Oxygen. It is fair and necessary to state that much of the work that LEAF started from was due to LRP, of which we thank-you for, but life goes on for all of us. There may have been more contributions to the LRP codebase, but you made that virtually impossible when you force your political views on others, especially when it can be construed that we share the same opinion w/o any warning or approval. You have personally nailed the coffin in any future development of LRP and ended what code contributions you 'could' have received due to your ego and disregard for the feelings/opinions of others. I'm sure this has also played out in your empoyablitiy as well, but that is a question that can not be answered by anyone outside of yourself and your past employers.
Nobody in LEAF is selling our code releases or making a living from it. I've personally been employed without work for 6 months myself, but I have no one to blame but myself for this. I have always found your abilities and code to be noteworthy, but this does not mandate that you would be able to make a living from what you give away. You have not made any available updates in around 3 years and I personally find it sad that you have reduced yourself to begging rather than make your useful place in society as most of us have been able to.... if for nothing else, but simply for the necessity of feeding our families.
Sincerely,
Lynn Avants
Waah, nobody's paying me to give away my work so I'm going to say sorry, I quit, shut the project down, kill the mailing list, lock everyone I can out of development, not pass it on to someone else that wants to take it over, or anything. I'm going to tell mommy and hold my breath until I pass out unless you give me money!
What do you want, a cookie?
If you wanted to make money on it, you should have sold it instead. If you're going to do this, don't make it open source and get other people to waste their valuable time on your project and then shut it down because of your personal problems.
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think Dave Cinege finally learned the harsh reality that it takes more than a reasonable amount of technical know-how to make an open source GPL project successful.
... it lacked this ingredient.
...
It requires charismatic, likable and vociferous spokespeople to promote the project and act as fundraisers, too. Clearly, if the LRP died due to lack of funding
It's a pity to see any open source project go, but lets learn from our collective mistakes instead of just ridiculing or pitying the poor sods who made them
-- Dossy
Dossy's Blog
The main point of the GPL is that you can use existing building blocks, solve your own problems with them, and then share your solution with others. Sometimes, the GPL is also used for scientific and academic reasons (reproducibility).
I think people should be suspicious of anybody who writes GPL'ed code to become famous or improve their skills (hello, Gnome and KDE). And anybody who tries to write GPL'ed code for that purpose has no right to complain when other take their code (under the GPL) and actually modify and use it so that it fits their own needs.
Open source and the GPL are not here to make you famous, they are here to help you solve your problems.
Just because you like package management that allows you to break it incredibly easily doesn't mean all other options should be unavailable.
Be open-minded. It's what the GPL is for.
+++ATH0
The FloppyFW distribution is the one I use, personally. I found it to be quicker to get up and running than the LRP. Also, it is very flexible with the ability to add packages, etc. I have SSH running on my FloppyFW to give a poor-man's tunneling into my network from outside...
Check out our infosecurity industry blog: http://securitymusings.com/
The GPL is very pragmatic: you take whatever GPL'ed components you need in order to solve your own problem and you are encouraged to contribute whatever you developed on top of them back to the community. That's all. If you don't have a problem to solve, you shouldn't be using GPL'ed code in the first place.
If you want to develop a new system from scratch and then make money with it, by all means, get some investors and try to sell the result. Personally, I think the market value of a system like Dave outlines above is pretty much zero, but that's between him and potential investors.
We know enough of Dave's history, those of us who were a part of LRP in the late 90s,
0 01/6/10 0/5950998/
to have collectively decided without discussion, as users/developers, to cancel his project.
Here's why:
1) Dave's GPL license says this (from grep, 1999:
#!/bin/ash
#
#POSIXness v0.20 19990529
#GPL2 -- Dave 'Kill a Cop' Cinege
Those of us who looked at that sort of wondered a bit, but didn't make the connection until the real kicker...
2) For 24 hours, right after Convicted Oaklahoma City murderer Tim McVeigh way executed, Dave DEDICATED THE OFFICIAL LRP SITE TO A MEMORIAL FOR TIM McVEIGH, who he considers a hero.
The discussion from the LRP list is here:
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/303/2
Dave face it. We don't like you. We gutted your project as any good coders would.
1st rule. Steal code & do unto others.
This an age old problem - somebody with excellent technical skills and a lot of enthusiasm falling down on commercial issues.
It would be nice to see more training available for technical workers who want to set up their own business - not to go sky high, get squillions of venture capital and rule the world - I think we all know by now that is a pretty rare occurence, but at least make a decent "cottage industry" out of their skills so they can make a reasonable living doing something they really enjoy.
I see loads of open source projects that could make the basis for a good consulting / services business, and often wonder how their owners are doing with them.
This is a perfect example of the open source/GPL projects at work. Those that are viable survive, those that are not die - or fork a different design path that takes the project in new directions, many times against the wishes of the original designer.
Ideally, we want project transitions to be happy 'passing of the batton' affairs. Unfortunately, sometimes they are not as this story illustrates.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
He's just ranting that the computer industry didn't make him a rich man because of his contributions to the open source community. But if he were making contributions to the open source community with the intent of getting rich, he had the wrong plan. It can happen, but it hardy happens commonly, and that should never be the motive for getting into it.
His final "news" entry is conflicted and inconsistent. He's mad about the open source community not paying his bills for him. He's mad that companies used his software without giving him a job -- as if they had that obligation. He's mad that he never saw the true value of his own project -- so what is he blaming other people for?
Sounds to me like he's just pissed off, and is desperately looking for anyone but himself to blame.
Would the LRP have happened at all if he hadn't used other GPL software? He laments bitterly about how he was never thanked or paid handsomly for his worok, but did he thank the people whose code he used? Did he pay them handsomly? Did he do little else but whine to other people that their software wasn't exactly what he wanted or needed?
Thats an issue; this whole situation is symmetric. Every author of every line of code he used in this project can, perhaps even should have the exact same bitterness, at him.
A raving, drooling, psychotic nutcase could be spot-on, but nobody listens to such a spokesman, so the intellectual battle is lost before it's even begun.
Umm, ESR?
What if... (and that's a big IF)
This guy has been secretly employed/paid by SCO/MS to do this, thus damaging the GPL and all works based on it.
Another FUD and a mud slinging match...
Just thinking...
I am a White Separatist open source programmer and to me it is funny to think of all the liberals who use my software and who would react in horror if they knew my beliefs.
P.S. No I am not this Linux Router guy.
i say forget gpl and release the code as foodware.. if someone likes your code and uses it, they have to send you grocery bags stock full of jolt cola and snacks... isnt that what c0derz eat?
problem solved, im waiting for the pr0pz
Man, if its about the money, I hear they're hiring at Microsoft.
Who needs a new operationg system bootable from a floppy? Why use it if I can have a bootable CD with a complete kernel, python, apache etc. etc.. This project makes no sense. Outdated. Sure, embeddeble devices are cool, but there's a lot of people also working on it. There's no reason to blame the GPL for the end of LRP.
LRP is the grand daddy of many "embedded" linux projects. LRP proved two concepts, 1) the need for GPL appliances that run from ram and essentially read-only media, and 2) a clever compressed read-only package system (.lrp instead of .rpm or .deb) for conserving boot media storage space. These ideas spawned LEAF, CoyoteLinux, and forshaddowed Knoppix, which all boot from floppy or CD-R media with compressed files to improve storage.
.lrp packages for other cool features like DNS caching. The .lrp packages were just a renamed .tar.gz with binaries compiled a certain way, but they worked and saved space. Although building an LRP floppy was not easy for a novice, the package system made floppy firewall setup MUCH easier. With developers shrinking package sizes again and again, other lrp packages could be added, or log files could be added. Very clever.
:) ]
...
LRP was floppy firewall distro, that did not need a harddrive. It needed only 386 PC or better, 2 Nics, floppy drive, and sometimes a keyboard and monitor. It did not do fancy things, just NAT routing, firewalling and DHCP. But you could add
But LRP failed to inivate fast enough, (e.g. I lobbied for a bootable CDs, to no avail) or document well enough, so Linux Embedded Application Firewall [LEAF] forked off. LEAF got space on SourceForge and spawned flavors, such as Oxygen, Dachstein, Eiger, Bering and others quickly helped fill out the space, improving core technologies and documentation. LEAF added bootable CDs and tons of packages. But LEAF struggled with picking a GlibC version and development of extensions became some what Balkanized.
The size limitation of the floppy made 2.4 kernal and iptables unatainable. Chuck Stienkhuler removed this boundry with his LRP-CD, which could fit every major linux ethernet driver, and so much more.
When I saw that, I thought, "well why not a full distro on a bootable CD", and was pleasently surprised by finding Knoppix. I even was the first person to mentioned it on Slashdot. [search Knoppix in stories on slashdot and find the first entry
LRP also spawned the CoyoteLinux firewall, which added a Win32 floppy build exe and a linux floppy build bash script. It makes building a floppy firewall really easy.
Death of LRP is not a surprise with LEAF on the scene. There is much life in the "embedded" linux space beyond firewalls. LRP got thing moving and many other GPL projects have adopted the core ideas and kept up the rate of acceleration. Bootable CD distros are exploding, into Mesh Networks, MAME systems, Linux on X-box hacks, PVR systems, LAN MP3 Servers, print server, LAN DNScache/DHCP/NTP server, Honey Pots and on and on. We will se more and more bootable CD distros, that will make our lives easier, and take the strain out of admin and system upgrade. Oh look, a new ISO on line, I down load and reboot my system. If it does not work, I pop the old CD-R back in. No muss, no fuss.
LRP is dead, long live LEAF and Knoppix, and
-Nathaniel
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux wanna be.
I got my CS degree 10 years ago, I've been coding for 15. I've been working as a sysadmin for the last 10 years, although initially, I was doing development work as well. I work at a fortune 100 comany, working on Sun starfire 6800s and E15ks.
haven't yet experienced the finer things of a UNIX sysadmin's career, like attempting to make the impossible happen day in and day out without so much as praise or acknowledgement.
Maybe it's just that I'm actually good at what I do, so that it isnt particularly a struggle for me to actually write clear shellscripts. Maybe it's that I actualy like solving problems, instead of trying to be a UNIX admin "for the money".
The people you describe are idiots. Either they have a sucky position, (in which case they should be looking for a new one), or they just suck at what they are supposed to do. For competant UNIX admins, "burnout" should not be an issue. As someone said quite a while ago, paraphrasing a bit: a sysadmin's job is to keep the systems running without problems. If you're not spending a lot of your time essentially 'doing nothing', then you're not doing your job. (ie: you should be PREVENTING fires, not fighting them; otherwise, you're incompetant)
u ar a fuck
Damn straight. I *like* my job! And I keep all the balls in the air, and people think that I am a genius because they never see me sweat. That is what I get paid for -- making it look like magic. It really should be fun. I posted right above -- this is a career, folks, and you should treat it like one. Treat it like one (professionally, methodically, and enthusiasticly) and you will do great. Burnout has never been an issue for me. Sure, sometimes the days get long, but I *like* what I do. Some of the most unhappy people I have met have been paper CCNEs and MCSEs who though that the streets would be paved with gold when they got that piece of paper and discovered that the unpleasantness didn't end with passing the exams -- the job was more of that same unpleasantness! But they were making "too much to quit" and were unhappy the whole time they were at work. This is not the way to live your life. If work sucks, figure out if it is the work or the workplace and fix what sucks. YOU DO NOT NEED TO PUT UP WITH IT. YOU WILL HAVE A HEART ATTACK AT 45. I have seen this several times at this point, in the office, with the paramedics and the old angry bitter people getting wheeled out under a mask as grey as stainless steel. You don't want to be on that cart. Trust me on this. Your job as a sysadmin is solving problems and planning ahead -- apply this to your own life. No one else will. Again, it should be fun. As they guy above says, for compentant UNIX sysadmins, "burnout" is not an issue. If it hurts that bad, stop doing it.
GPL kills any oppurtunity for revenue. It does, however foster a fantastic community, but as a business plan?
GMAFB, If he wanted to make dollar one, copyright it. It would have protected him against all the crap he's complaining about.
GPL, you can't have your cake and get paid for eating it too.
HE IS A PSYCHO
The lesson to learn in all this is never do anything for free if you want to make money. Get the money first, and if you don't get the money, don't do it. I've done a couple of freeware projects, and the only ones I've been content (not happy, just content) are the ones I did for fun with _no_ expectation of getting anything, not even a thankyou. These are incredibly rare. On the Internet where everything is for free, you're nothing special.
Mr LRP should be happy he learnt the lesson now. Others (myself included) have wasted years on projects we've kept putting effort into on the basis that one day that time and work would somehow pay off. It doesn't.
Always get the money first. And if you do it anyway, don't secretly yearn for anything in return, because you won't get it.
> giving away code - good code - has many other benefits:
Yes, that's what the flyers says, with the grinning visages of Linus Nux and Larry Perl, but these are exceptions. Much like the Real Estate Seminars where they tell you they made millions and now you can to. Unfortunately for everyone else it simply isn't true.
Let's make a GPL$ license where you can do anything you want, but if the licensee is going to make $$$ out of it, they have to give some back you. Alternately if you want to make it free, ban commercial redistributions, like POVRAY.ORG do.
maybe programmers should have wishlists like camgirls?
Several of my projects fall into the same category.
Artists starve. Especially if they write software.
I work full-time on embedded work. He could do the same and work on LRP later.
I don't think it is dead (unless the floppy is). He doesn't have infinite time, but he hasn't found enough helpers, yet hasn't found a benefactor. So what? Life isn't fair or nice.
Linus is a great coordinator and facilitator, but he only writes a little (proportionately) code. Linux is written by thousands.
If LRP is worth it, it will continue on sourceforge or someplace similar and be more than a one man project.
this story is still sad. The situation reflected in the LPR story is all but too familiar. The best coders - I should say code slingers - I new left or are leaving the industry disgusted. That would leave lousy wannabe programmers like myself around. I guess we'll have to learn to code for real or we're doomed! ;-)
The cemetery is full of irreplaceable people...
Currently, I have not found a suitable fanless PSU in a standard PC-mountable case. But there are other options. I have not yet decided which way I will go.
I hope this information helps you. I'm sorry, but for all variants, you need to know which end of the soldering iron you can always touch without pain. ;-)
Denken hilft.
Dave,
.tgz archive and >work has and is being done to replace this format. 'apkg' has been available
>I am a project member of LEAF and feel somewhat compelled to reply to your >comments if you feel inclined to take the time to read them.
I'm the guy that wrote LRP from scratch and I need to respond to this bullshit.
> LEAF and the literly dozens of other off shoots used the LRP os as their >base and then added enhancements mostly via the way of application specific >extenstions. I've yet to see any major revamping of the OS itself by anyone >else...only upgrades to newer componets. (kernel, busybox, etc...)
>While this is true to some extent, much work has gone on beyond your base as >well as Matthew Grant's work.
Matt Grant was LRP's first 'problem child'. Matt wanted to radically alter the networking scripts. I said it was too complex for the base. Please put them in a package. Matt proceeded to release his own version of LRP.
Again, LRP with some networking scripts.
Matt had NO PART in writing LRP. Matt did little to nothing it even support his own releases. This began to happen in very late 1999 when i was in the middle of relocating, and my mistake was to be passive about it instead of putting his ass in line. It caused a great deal of confusion in the project.
Of no surprise to me, Matt basically vanished, and I was left with the mess
of 'supporting' his releases.
>Many of us made use of the LRP site's resources though you rarely (if ever) >showed any indication of using any of our work or including any other >developers in your personal work (which was "LRP" itself).
Now this is a crock of fucking shit. I spent phone time with at least 3 different 'leaf' people in late 2000/early 2001. None of them followed through on any promise of work they commited too me. (Exception: Charles S. did split up POSIXness into module parts as I asked...but again further things never progressed.) The only thing anybody ever did fully and did really well was Ray handling bounces on the mailing list.
I couldn't reject anything because NOTHING WAS EVER SENT.
It should also be noted the 'leaf' people didn't know LRP from a hole in the
wall until cira 2000, ~4 years into the project.
> There is little to none of your code in David Douthitt's "Oxygen" project
> that has been reworked to necessitate only the kernel patches.
Let's reword this
"All your code has been removed...except what was needed to make it run"
The entire lay out of the OS is of course still LRP
>The kernel patches do not work with a 2.4.x kernel and any variants using
> these newer kernels have written their own patches."
More FUD. Patches for 2.4.16, 2.4.20, and 2.5.45 are @
http://ftp.psychosis.com/linux/initrd-dyn/kerne lpa tches/
The claim leaf rewrote the dynamic initial ramdisk scheme from
scratch is more crap.
>True to an extent, this package format is little more than a
Again based on eveything I did, and it is not what you would call a robust packaging system either.
>Which is the foundation of the LEAF project (found in the FAQ section). >Rather LEAF is a project that promotes somewhat similar variants or OS's >under an unbrella that encourages every release to do their own thing w/o >needing to be constrined to approval by a single person such as LRP was.
Let's remove the spin from that: Their are 5 people all putting out their own varient of LRP with varing coherency and compatiblity between them all.
That is exactly what I tried to prevent with LRP: fragmentation and over specialization of the core OS.
>Many of our variants do still use a some of your base, but this is at a >dead-end as far to the degree we could extend it and we are moving on as >future development demands and this comment will not be true in any degree >with near future releases.
Not everyone works with big-dollar Sun hardware that comes backed with 24/7 Sun support. Not everyone's hardware work consists of sliding CPU and disk modules out of nifty little slots and then tickling Solaris gently into seeing them. Not everyone works for a Fortune 100 company with benefits and a stable payroll. Some folks *wish* their most notable sysadmin duties include writing shellscripts.
If your job consists of the above, I see how you're confused as to what the source of burnout is. What I'm trying to say is - you're being awfully pretentious, close to the point of being a gloating asshole. Feel a little more compassion and empathy for your fellow tech workers. Your high-and-mighty tax bracket may remove you from worrying about doing work "for the money", and removing yourself socioeconomically from your struggling counterparts is dangerous, and also bad karma. Please - I know what's going through your head; pretty much every working professional thought the same thoughts at some point in their lives.
Just for the record, I am not a sysadmin.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...well - with that kind of answer it's no wonder you where left alone... And why LEAF are still alive and kicking!
Me (who's a leaf user)
don't offer gifts when you can't afford them, because them leeches will not even thank you.
Just not quite yet.
;-)
Quack, quack.
Perhaps we should start designing a system to get voluntary payments from users to hackers?
Yup ! Great idea - and as usual with great ideas, already been done - check out Affero.
www.affero.net
--
No I am not affiliated with affero in anyway not that it would matter anyway since its all Open/Free Source software anyway.
Uh, you mean the four pillars of male heterosexist overcompensating ignoramuses?
Look at typing: when typewriters were big, heavy mechanical monsters, expensive and fairly rare, one could make good money typing. Even when I was in high school nearly forty years ago, students seldom typed their papers because they often didn't know how. Today, it's expected. In fact, it's often expected that they use a word processor.
The same thing is happening to programming as a skill. When I paid for my final year of college through programming for research (PL1 on an IBM 360, punch cards, JCL), even then most of the work was merely data entry and maintanence. Then it was such a black art skill that a person with no training nor experience but logical thinking and an ability to learn could go into programming as a career (I didn't).
But today, all the easily computerized skills are already done. What good is it to write the upteenth word processor? Can I make a better spreadsheet? Database? Codeslinging is becoming a commodity. (Maybe that's why there is so much bad code out there, people who have learned to sling code but are not good at researching algorithms are writing much of the software.) The demand is not there. Wake up and smell the coffee. Adapt.
Now typing pools are popping up in third world countries. But they don't replace the office secretary. But the secretary, in order to survive, is also the office manager, the door keeper, coffee maker, and so forth: typing is only one of her tasks. Likewise, the programmer will have to know a certain amount about the mechanical repair of computers, trouble shooter, trainer, tech support, and he might be allowed to sling some code as well. If his boss is forward thinking and has adapted GNU tools and software, he's less likely the fire the computer expert who is saving him (the boss) so much money. Pay will be about what a secretary makes. If the boss is indulgent, the programmer will be allowed to spend a few hours a week on a GNU project or two (professional enhancement).
The only programmers who will get high salaries will be those who are doing research, who devise new algorithms which they hand off to coders to translate into software. Many of those will be professors. Others in top research facilities. Their main skill will not be writing programs, but in developing algorithms to allow computers to solve previously unsolved problems. Their work will be too valuable to squander as code slingers. Their degrees will be in physics, chemestry, civil or mechanical engineering, etc. and a few with degrees in computer engineering.
There are plenty of computer jobs, not just code slinging. Be flexible in your requirements. Just don't expect too much from it, and you may be pleasently surprised. And don't blame GNU for the lack of paying jobs, this is a market force that was developing anyways and GNU scratched that itch very well.
As for me, I'm not a progrmmer. Occasionally I use GWBASIC to develop and test algorithms to solve problems in other areas, then often won't touch programming for years until the next problem comes along. Programming is just a tool, like typing.
He has decided that to have a job doing exactly what you want to do is a human right.
it would be nice, no doubt, but you must be realistic no matter which enterprise you wish to pursue.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I hope you are ironic (and that the moderators that gave "interesting" to your post are also full of irony).
So the way to protest goverment abuse is to bomb a building with innocent people (in the purest sense of the word, since many babies died) and such a comment you think would come from a clear-sighted person?
I hope you are ironic and I, humourless git, just missed the point completely...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... you can't just put yourself in an island.
The only sane way to ensure we don't kill each other is to allow a degree of cotrolled ordered mandated by a trusted authority.
If you don't trust the authority, fair enough, change it. There are plenty of ways to exert change without harming innocent people as many nutcases are prepared to do.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... or you can go out like you did.
If the former you receive praise and understanding. If the later you are poinedt out you obviuos shortcommings and even the dirty laundry is airated in public.
I am sorry but this was something of your own making (as it was to give your work away under the GPL) so please grow up and bare the consequences of your actions.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Do you think Isaac Newton was intending to study the gravitational fields and the laws that govern them in order to make a buck?
Do you trult think that Turing came with all his theory only to make a buck.
Heck, do you think Linus Torvalds started Linux in order ot make a buck?
Nothing you are passionate about for which you invest time, effort and even, shudder, money, is worth zero.
It appales me that there are people that have a balance sheet view of life in which any activitity has to be measured and acknoledged in a so far as how much money it brings.
If you are a programmer whoe imperative is to make a buck by selling software, then yes, most probably the GPL is a harder way to work. That does not mean that if you understand what you are doing and how you are licensing your code, the great software you realease under the GPL all of the sudden becomes worhtless.
Vincent van Gogh died in poverty but I am sure he would have never considered all his unsold masterpieces worth zero.
Zealots of the balance sheet should jump from the high cliff of their ego.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My company (big one, believe me) is exploiting OS all around the place.
:-) ).
Full teams of SAs administering Linux, Web masters using Apache, programmers using bash, perl and python are working as I type (not me, but hye, somebody has to make the point
If programmers create an infrastrucuture that companies can trus and use cheaply there will be work to harness that technology.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I think it depends a great deal on what I'm hiring for. Very rarely in an entry level corporate programming position is genuine talent even desirable much less desirable enough to outweight the things candidate (1) would have like:
a) willingness to do work he does not enjoy when told too (hence the high grades)
b) A broader base of conceptual understanding
c) Skills in other areas of a liberal arts education which can impact job performance (english in terms of writing, polysci/history in terms of understanding governing structures...)
In other words am I hiring a basketball coach for highschool kids or for pros? Very different criteria.
As pointed out above, its cocaine. Which I also recommend.
Make no mistake about it, open sourcers make bad businessmen!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Just exactly how many Human Resource departments do you think are going to take the time out of their busy days to go trolling on the internet tracking down email and mailing list leads for a prosepective employee who's a college drop out when they have hundreds and hundreds of resumes from programmers WITH degrees?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Uh no. If your project is worth any kind of a damn then you'll be able to get people to pay for it. Even if its open source (hence Darwin or Redhat..etc).
His project was worthless because it wasn't worth enough for people to pay.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Care to respond to the assinine Oklaholma Bombing comments you've made?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
u ear a fkcu
Most millionaires are savvy businessmen almost no one has never heard of, and, quite honestly, most millionaires are simply regular people who had unique insight and were willing to take a risk
True. What I find curious is the observation (sorry, I forget where I read this) that most millionaires don't have a college degree.
-kgj
That is all. :)
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
ur a fuck