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Shorewall Developer Tom Eastep Quits
Flaming Foobar writes "Tom Eastep has announced that he is quitting all development and support of my favorite iptables front-end, Shorewall. In his e-mail to the Shorewall Users mailing list he states that 'just cannot deal with the support and documentation frustration any
more -- support, the documentation and the web site consume an order of
magnitude more of my time than does Shorewall development.' I can't help but wonder if this could happen to more OSS projects in the future - will people get tired of donating huge chunks of their life to free software?"
Another programmer who hates do write documentation
More like "Flameboy" or "Flamewar starter"?
Of course there will be OSS developers that get tired of donating huge chunks of their lives, but there will always be others who will step up and take their places.
Everyone is replacable (yeah, know, it sounds sad), but it's true (at least when it comes to OSS development).
If the code is out there, free, someone else can pick it up and continue where the last person left off.
And if no one does, then it either means that not enough people were interested in keeping the software alive/needed the software OR the software had implemented almost everything that people needed from that piece of software.
It's life, get used to it, and don't try to start flamewars.
It's too bad that he couldn't find some one to help him. Shame to see good software die of frustration.
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Unfortunately, this ensures that a lot of OSS will always be nerds-only.
(this might not work for small projects that nobody knows about, but once you've got a bit of mindshare, there shouldn't be a problem with slacking off in areas you don't enjoy, no?)
Open source is really good at the interesting parts of coding, but the boring parts are hard to get done by people who aren't getting paid. I do think that this relegate OSS to nerds-only. And I don't think that's a bad thing either. Imagine FAQs and other support fora full of things like "how do I list the files in a directory?"
Having done a semblance of technical support for non-technical people in my neighborhood, I never cease to be surprised by how confusing something like, say, the file system is to a non-technical person.
Share and enjoy,
Mike.
I am not a shorewall user, but it seems to be a good tool.
The number of people who are "users", but not developers, is enormous. These people should be perfectly able to write documentation, even if it's just a wiki. I've seen some projects with horrible documentation, while others have fantastic stuff.
Perhaps an organization could be formed with the sole purpose of writing docs for OSS projects.
I use shorewall on my LEAF/Bering router on an old Pentium 1. It's been routing and protecting my home cable network and a couple internal servers for over a year now (current uptime is probably 5 months or so). I also set it up on an x86 machine on Debian at my old job when their POS proprietary firewall/router fried itself. I've told a few people who I've worked with that I think that Shorewall is the BEST DOCUMENTED open source app I've ever used. I learned much of what I know about proxy arping, arp caches, how DMZ's actually work, CIDR, and lots of other stuff like that from the Shorewall documentation. Even if you don't intend to USE Shorewall, if you want to learn more about networking, take a look at the Shorewall docs. It's probably the best concise explanation of many network concepts that I've come across (including text books, other online docs...) So, Thanks Tom Eastep. I've learned a LOT from your work, and you've made an incredible contribution to free open source software!!!
You've been dutifully registering ever major version of the software and you're pumped because the next version is supposed to have some features you really want. Alas, the developer decides that he's not making enough money or is just bored with the project and gives up on it.
Now where are you?
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
he needed some other people to take care of the other stuff while he did development.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
effort to develop software
1 unit = code for yourself
3 units = code given to someone else (library probs, config probs)
9 units = code given to a group (HOWTO, ifdefs, tar-gzip, etc)
27 units = FOSS code (cvs, mailing list, configure, make, docs)
81 units = product code (legal, sales, market, packaging, distribution)
243 units = viable software for 30 years (literate pgms, deep documentation, research, major redesign, etc)
The effort to get real software to be viable is hard, long term, and thankless.
How much code are you writing that will be useful 30 years from now?
What are you doing to make that happen?
You can get away without writing much documenation these days. Usually the larger distros have how-tos for all common software. I just recently set up Shorewall on Gentoo and used the Gentoo documentation to do it. I looked around on Shorewall's site, had a hard time figuring it out.. and then found a Gentoo how-to that had a step by step guide on how to do it on my distro of choice (which is easier than a generic how-to anyway).
Let the documenation go, and just post the source code on the site.
kernel.org isn't exactly a documenation cornucopiea after all.
Writing is a VERY difficult mental challenge, and a different type of mental challenge than programmers face. It is rare that a person can do both well, and is willing to do both well.
Would you or others be interested? Maybe if they were getting paid for their extra work beyond development, we wouldn't lose developers like this.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
It's going to be the price of popularity.
I've been subscribed to the Debian users list for years. They get a lot of mail, but most of it is from users who generally score above the baboon on the UF intelligence test. In short, they are generally technically adept questions that have some thought behind them. Not all, but a lot of them.
I spend a year subscribed to the SuSE users list and have quite a different impression. They score around mollusk. The questions are the most annoying and obvious questions. I clearly reminded me of a gaggle of Windows Users more than anything else.
As Open Source software goes mainstream, we will be reminded that mainstream is different. They are not problem solvers like the more stereotypical geek community. They like things that work, but when they don't work, regardless of the reason, they are a bit lost.
If you make a great product, not only will the great people use it.
I sincerely hope a team steps up to the plate to maintain shorewall. It would take a whole team of mere mortals to replace Tom, and they'd better be smart.
:-((
Shorewall is by far the best self-contained and designed firewall package on linux at the moment.
You may not think it manly to delegate writing iptables rules to a program, but I have complex multi-zone setups with for large clusters that would be simply unmaintainable without shorewall.
... and leave off the support, documentation, and website. That would save a lot of time and effort.
Any developer worth their salt will be able to figure out how to use it simply by reading the code.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
I hate writing documentation too. So when I notice that I'm getting a lot of support questions for a feature, I like to tweak the UI so it's more intuitive. Eventually the confusion disappears due to better UI design.
Shorewall is THE best free firewall right now so this isn't about just another project losing its founder. I evaluated open source firewalls this year and it came out on top by a big margin.
I'm a FreeBSD user and I can honestly say the only reason I chose Linux for my firewall was Shorewall. It makes creating and managing complex firewall rules very easy without requiring a GUI.
FireHol is another promising solution but it wouldn't have been enough for me to switch to Linux.
I hope Tom gets his life back on track and continues to be involved in helping maintain Shorewall in way that brings him more satisfaction.
I work on two open source projects, one I do as a hobby and one I get paid for. For the one I get paid for, a significant chunk of time is spent doing technical support. This can be quite demoralising: there are always people for whom it simply Does Not Work and you aren't entirely sure why (usually because their system is broken or hopelessly exotic). But when you get a support ticket closed as fixed, it's quite a nice feeling. I wouldn't do it unless I was paid to though.
The one I don't get paid to work on, most of my time is spent on "boring" stuff as well like debugging, investigating other peoples goofs and writing documentation. I do that because I'm the maintainer and I like to see the project thrive and grow. It's like gardening. It can't all be planting pretty flowers all the time: somebody has to do the weeds. Well, that somebody is me, and the reward comes in the form of the final result rather than the process of getting there.
You can bet that he knows for quite a while that OSS-development is not a rose garden, because he actually did all that for quite a while. Far from expecting something ...
... and he was and IS truly devoted to his OSS-work.
He has something to complain about, if he has to use a breathing-aid for sleep
Ever ran a OSS-project on your own?
For more than a few months?
Successfully?
Healthy?
---
I respect his step.
"As Open Source software goes mainstream, we will be reminded that mainstream is different. They are not problem solvers like the more stereotypical geek community. They like things that work, but when they don't work, regardless of the reason, they are a bit lost."
And this ladies and gentlemen is why, even with MS's large marketshare. Apple is still in business.
"Guess what? If you take a job as a professional software developer, a great deal of your time will be spent supporting, fixing, and documenting code written by someone else."
Correct. However with the cathedral model. One makes enough money that they can keep a roof over their heads, and save enough money. So that they can move on to better things. While your replacement handles your former duties. With the bazzar model, you don't have that, and basically have to do what Eastep did. Leave it all behind, and hope that someone will pick it up.
Any yet your complaining....
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to judge people. I'm guilty myself of not contributing much back to the OSS community but it's something I want to change this year. It doesn't have to be much, many hands make light work as they say.
www.techwatch.com.au
So, what software have you written? Let's see the website and mailing list. If you're going to shoot your stupid mouth off, you'd better have plenty of ammo. I've been using shorewall for a few years, and it has the best documentation of any FOSS code I've seen. It's also the best firewall code for linux out there, and I've looked. I can understand why he's burned out - Shorewall is a hell of a product and he's done more work on the docs than some corporate products I've seen.
Where did I say Shorewall wasn't a fine product?
Where did I say Tom hadn't done a fantastic job?
Where did I say he wasn't devoted to his work?
What I did say was that, as a human being, he needs to learn how to cope or the world will eat him alive.
It's the same thing all of us deal with. I went through it in my profession, and most people (unless they're pampered) go through it in theirs. Some people learn to cope and go on to be successful. Some people don't learn to cope, burn up, and drop out.
Note the mods are obviously in the pampered group since they don't seem to be familiar with this concept.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.