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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?
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.
Live's to short - do another mile.
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 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 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=-
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
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.
The only people that get paid to do what they love are porn stars.
Yeah, that's what I used to think until I started acting in porn movies. Most of the women I've worked with are seriously f***ed up and no small percentage of them are on drugs. I'm tired of having to cup my hands under their breasts to hide the scars from the implants. I'm sick of getting into all kinds of contorted positions so that the bimbos' tattoos don't make it look like I'm f***ing a biker chick. I dread getting tested for STDs every few months. The "scripts" read like something written by Beavis and Butthead. The pay is lousy if you are a man and even the women don't make as much as you might think. Many of them do the movies just so that they can rake in the bucks at personal appearances where they sign autographs or dance at sleazy strip joints as the "celebrity porn star" of the week. Everybody thinks I'm soo lucky to have a 9" schlong and to be in porn movies. Well, it's not so great as you might think. Okay, I just made up that whole thing, but I had fun screwing with people's minds.
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
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
Ooooh, a bridge troll! ;)
No, I'm not giving you my money.
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!
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.
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!!
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'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.
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.
Freesco is a single floppy router/dns/dhcp/etc.
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.
Maybe some people like the GPL because, say, they understand it, unlike you?
Any code he wrote himself and which was his own code he can re-release under any licence he wants, even if he already released it GPL. The GPL does not stop you from releasing your own code under any other licence; it can't. It can stop you from releasing code incorporating somebody else's GPLed code, but then again that's the point-- to protect the original author from having their code used in a way they don't want.
It's disinformation to suggest that if somebody releases their own code as GPL, they can't later release it as something else. It's poor thinking to then take that incorrect assertion and use it as a basis for attacking the GPL.
-Rob
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.
He could be as depressed as Kevin Flanagan was about his life's work .
/ in dustries/5893252.htm
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...
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.
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.
The main one is that they are desperate not to get involved in any sort of money-laundering or porn scam - to the point that a single complaint (even anonymous) can get an account (potentially containing thousands of dollars) "frozen" until you prove your innocence; sometimes they just won't give a reason, and your money is just locked for months while they perform their own investigations.
The second is an extension - paypal reserve the right to pull cash directly from any bank account or CC you give them if (in *their* opinion) they are justified in doing so. you get no appeal from them and there is no regulatory body to complain to (paypal are careful to stay outside of the criteria that would make them a regulated bank; they are simply "agents" for the financial transactions, although exactly how that works if you have $20,000 in their possession (paid by your customers but not forwarded to you) for months at their whim is a little difficult for me to figure..)
There are other issues (like the privacy ones) but those are the main two.
-=DaveHowe=-
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.
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.)
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
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)
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.