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:Flaming Foobar

[WetCat]

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...

Re:Why write documentation at all?

[kupci]

Actually, not only is he a good coder, he's also good at documentation. Check out the site, and here's a quote from one of his users:

I want to say that Shorewall documentation is the best I've ever found on the net. It's helped me a lot in understanding how network is working. It is the best of breed. It contains not only Shorewall specific topics with the assumption that all the rest is well known, but also gives some very useful background information. Thank you very much for this wonderful piece of work. --AS, Poland

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

Perhaps it was lack of incentive

[ancientt]

Free software doesn't always mean free support. Is there a place out there somewhere where developers can take posted tech questions and documentation requests? I'd like to see one where the questions get voted on by other people who want to see them answered with a paypal (or other media) contribution. Basically ask your question and pledge a dollar or three and get a refund if the question or documentation request doesn't meet a minumum amount within a period of time. Heh, maybe I should do that with my own website.

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.