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?"

Comments

Why write documentation at all?

[interiot]

If you hate writing documentation, why not simply Don't Do It? I've seen plenty of good OSS software out there with crappy documentation. In these cases, if the software is good enough, other people recognize the need and fill in with their own user-generated documentation, and this eventually is as good as most people need. It's the open-source way.

(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?)