End Of Development For Grsecurity Announced?

vrtk writes "I received this minutes ago, from the grsecurity mailing list, also displayed on the official site for the open-source security project: 'Beginning today, May 31, 2004, development of grsecurity will cease. On June 7, the website, forums, mailing list, and CVS will be shut down. Due to a sponsor unexpectedly dropping sponsorship of grsecurity while continually promising payment, I began the summer in debt and had to borrow money from family to pay for food. If none of the companies that depend on grsecurity, some of them being very large, are able to sponsor the project, grsecurity will cease to exist. I am not looking for paypal donations at this point, unless those that donate do so with the recognition that despite their donation, grsecurity may still never be returning.'"

Comments

windows guy

[Anonymous Coward]

this was some windows guy anyway so why should we care?

Open source

[skraps]

Yea, open source. Works great as an economic system. Yep.

So what?

[benh999]

Since when is corporate monetary sponsorship necessary for an individual to develop open-source software?

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why you sell software. If you want to give stuff away, that's fine. But it's awfully arrogant and naive to demand stuff like "food" and "clothes" to be given to you just because you've released Yet Another Open Source Package.

Economies exist so that people can trade the products of their effort for the products of others' efforts. Money is not evil, nor is earning money by developing software.

Re:So what?

[benh999]

I have before. I'm still owed close to $10k by web site advertising agencies. I continued to operate my web site in the red for two years. I was making money to do something I enjoyed.

Despite being upset by having to shell out $400/mo for hosting, I did not throw a fit like this guy.

What you say?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that software actually costs money to develop and that programmers have to eat?! No way! I don't believe it. All software should be freeeeee!!!!!

I wonder if

[iminplaya]

somebody is going to take it "closed source" and then use the DMCA to prohibit anyone from looking for the GPL code inside.

Re:pardon my ignorance

[Anonymous Coward]

My dear, go to the linked grsecurity homepage, jump over the "we're closing" message, take a look at the navigation menu and chose features.
Is your diaper wet again?!

who cares.

[JDizzy]

If this poroject was really about security and less so about the ego of the principle developer, it could easily continue to exist with any number of free web hosting solutions for open source projects. The fact that the kit is available in the GPL just goes to show the principle developer has an ego that prevents the project form being free, or he is greedy and want to assymilate any tweaks somebody else might have to contribute. IS it really so hard to get a source-fourge account for the project which will host the project for free; NO! The simple answer is this is just a last finalyl plea for attention by some whimp that doesn't have a life.

Besides all that, grecurity doesn't do anything special above and beyond other security kits. Extra random ip sequence numbers (give me a break), a more hard chroot (please, everyone does this), users not being able to see the proc of other users, this is a standard feature of most *nix systems these days (I guess finux lags). Roll based security scheam (he doesn't give much detaisl of that). So all in all it seems that the project isn't that good, and should probably just use somebody elses kit instead.

Re:Smells like a lawsuit

[Deusy]

Sound a lot like material breach of contract with them not coming through with the money. Or else the deliberatly sabatoged it in order to own that dev space.

Or, on the flip side, sounds more like a child throwing toys out of the preverbial pram.

It's almost blackmail. "Support me else I shut it down."

That's hardly in the spirit of Free Software.