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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
Huh! he's right, and it doesn't seem like many folks were very happy with him.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
It's the same guy. Look at the website advertised in the tag line of this message (https://www.psychosis.com/) then look at the contact email address on http://linuxrouter.org/ (dcinege _at_ psychosis.com).
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
Well, perhaps he just isn't as good a programmer as these guys. Or perhaps they made what he started a better thing.
The LRP is dead, long live LEAF - The Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall, based on LRP, with extended Firewall features, and based on Linux 2.4 (i.e. with stateful packet filtering).
Woohoo!
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