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

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.