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

Re:No surprice here

[Juergen Kreileder]

Another programmer who hates do write documentation

Maybe he hated it but he has written documentation: http://shorewall.net/Documentation_Index.html

Re:Flaming Foobar

[myspys]

Yeah, of course he was very valuable to ShoreWall (and to OSS in general). And even when he's gone, his work is still very valuable.

And maybe my post came off sounding a bit 'harsh'.

My point/attack was more on the submitter, that it sounded like he was trying to start a flamewar/scare maneuver or something along those lines.

Thanks to Tom Eastep

[gregorlowski]

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!!!

Re:Why write documentation at all?

[bcoff12]

Let me clarify one thing. Tom didn't seem to mind writing the documentation, he just was befuddled as to why people couldn't find the answers they were looking for in the docs.

To say that Shorewall is the best documented OSS I've ever seen is no understatement.

Shorewall will carry on. A team is being put together to make sure that happens.