Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
...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
...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
Sounds like this project died from success. LRP hit a point where nobody was needing to scratch an itch anymore and development came to a halt. So the guy embarked on some wierd non-unix offshoot and found zero interest in that (duh!) so he is dropping out.
Perhaps it is time to let someone with an interest in maintaining the current codebase take it over. Doesn't sound like it would take much effort at this point other than backporting the occasional fix for an exploit.
Democrat delenda est
Since when does six months of labour constitute a "life's work?" Hell, if I thought the last six months of my labours constituted my "life's work," I would be pretty pissed off, too. That said, Mr. Cinege will be getting no sympathy from me. I run at least one GPLed project, and I don't run it hoping and dreaming that somebody will come around and give me $100,000 for it.
How much more do I have to say before it becomes obvious that expecting this (and "punishing" us by not releasing what you *have* done for another developer to persue) is about the least mature thing I have seen from any developer *ever*?
If this is how you approach life, it's no wonder people are in no hurry to give you $100,000, guy. But all that aside, what entitles you to $100,000, when so many more competent and qualified developers go unpaid? what makes you so much better than they are, Mr. Cinege?
Mod me a troll if you must. Whether you want to admit it or not, "Dave" is being as unreasonable as anybody I have ever seen before. That sort of logic will not get you far in the business world when you want to put food on the table and pay the rent. There's nothing more to say.
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.
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.
Running a successful free software project buys you many demanding "followers" and then you have to choose: You can become a disliked "capitalist" by rejecting feature requests unless you're getting paid to implement them or someone else volunteers to implement them. Or you risk losing momentum by saying no whenever you feel you can't justify the amount of work. Or you are a "nice" person and answer support requests, implement feature requests, fix bugs and generally do everything your "followers" demand from you -- and burn out.
There are people who can't say no. A programmer who doesn't get paid for his open source work has more important things to do. And thus, for a volunteering open source programmer, nothing is as important a character trait as being able to say no. Otherwise you end up having to say no to the whole project, and for a person who is used to caving in to external demands that must be a terrible situation.
These people are responsible for many great free programs. But at some point they realize that they can't justify the dedication they put into these programs and since they don't know how to continue working on them with less dedication, they end the project. It is important to realize that as long as they are with the project, these people are the most dedicated open source programmers, therefore they don't deserve your "no sympathy" ranting. He is now in the state of mind which you demand of him. He is now at the point where he actually realizes that putting food on the table, that paying the rent is more important than pleasing many ungrateful "followers" and that the project is not going to pay his expenses. He values his dedication to the project with the payment for a qualified full-time job. That's not your judgement to make. He can't get in return what he expected, so he finally says no. His gain is many people's loss, so there will be a lot of bitching.
When I said "use it commercially" I meant "make money selling it under a commercial license". To make money with it, they need to modify it ("add value") and the GPL forces them to make their diffs available under GPL as well, which basically means someone will send the diffs to me and I may incorporate them in my version, making their added value available to everyone.
So the fact remains, if someone wants to make money selling my software (and I'm not talking about Red Hat or other distributors of my software here), he needs to talk to me.
Also, I wonder what you mean by "poor". I have a nice little family, can pay my bills, and get paid doing what I like to do -- what more could I possibly want from life? I don't have to be a millionaire. To me it's more about what remains when you die, and when I die, I will leave some offspring and some (fine?) free software behind. What (besides some mediocre slashdot trolls) are you planning to leave behind for future generations?
He spent a long time doing something that(even if he shouldn't have) he thought would lead to an income, or atleast, he thought it SHOULD lead to one given the interests corporations have had in his project.
Here's the crux.. and many MANY programmers just for some reason cannot grasp the concept...
If you GPL it, you should be doing so out of the desire to give back to the planet. Linux certianly didnt release Linux as a "I'm gonna get rich off this!" and he certianly isn't bill gates because of it. John Hall isnt in the kernel for the Money and glory...
When a project goes to pot because of reasons OTHER than the GPL and most everyone leaves it, the lead developer usually get's really pissy, and i can understand that, but they either never understood the GPL or they forgot why they GPL'd it in the first place.
Dont forget why you GPL'd in the first place. and do NOT be bitter when "suprise" corperate america sodomizes you.... as no company can be trusted for any reason... they are ouyt for one thing, profits... not for advancing the common good.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.