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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?"
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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Yes. That's my goal in life. To pick up someone else's project and write the documentation for it and do the support. That's what I live for. Oh, and fix the bugs in it, too.
Look on Sourceforge and you see a lot of projects that have some grandiose plan, one developer, and no released files. I think that they should write the documentation first, then attract other developers to write portions of it. Then the single person who starts the project doesn't get stuck with sole support for life. Seems to have worked for Linus.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Guess what?
I am a bad coder and the only thing I can do is to write docs and translations. This is the only way (besides donations) I can help F/OSS...
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.
Because as a developer, the only thing that gets me as jazzed as figuring out how to fix a thorny problem is seing real people out in the field using it successfully. Conversely, if I do a wonderful job at designing and implementing a piece of software and it doesn't get widely used, then it's a drag.
Documentation is a big help.
Some writers can program after a fashion, and some programmers can write after a fashion, but few can do both at a high level of proficiency, and technical writing is a highly specialized discipline in itself,so you may well have a person with high verbal skills who can use them to program and to write, and still have him produce crappy documentation.
I think that some consulting tech writers might have an opportunity to pick a high profile project, such as the Spring framework, and donate some of their slack time. If documentation carries proper credits, it could be a nice calling card.
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As for support, if you check the mailing list he answers many of the posts. This is simple burnout, I can't imagine working at HP, and putting the effort into a project of this magnitude. It seems he's had to expend superhuman effort, to make up for the slackers, for example to assist users in getting the code working on all varieties of Linux, yet like typical users, a few users seem to fail to bother to RTFM, and fail to read the license even (it's not like he's got the money to maintain a call center). Perhaps if he could get paid support, he could quit his job at HP and devote full time to the project
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.
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.
Not an ideal solution, I admit. But better coming off like he did in his email. The one paragraph about the email expecting support for the old version didn't even make sense...
I won't knock the guy's contribution, but it's not like anyone was forcing him to do anything. He quits. Fine. I don't want to hear the non-sensical whining and complaining.
+5 Insightful, really!
This is very true, in my experience. There's no substitute for the original developer (unless of course they've been doing a poor job already). I've seen one complex OSS project be left by the original developer and still, years later, no new releases are made; even though the project was very successful and used by many, many people.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
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.
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.
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