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

Flaming Foobar

[myspys]

More like "Flameboy" or "Flamewar starter"?

Of course there will be OSS developers that get tired of donating huge chunks of their lives, but there will always be others who will step up and take their places.

Everyone is replacable (yeah, know, it sounds sad), but it's true (at least when it comes to OSS development).

If the code is out there, free, someone else can pick it up and continue where the last person left off.

And if no one does, then it either means that not enough people were interested in keeping the software alive/needed the software OR the software had implemented almost everything that people needed from that piece of software.

It's life, get used to it, and don't try to start flamewars.

Re:Flaming Foobar

[Intron]

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.

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:Flaming Foobar

[dcowart]

The point you're missing is that he actively supported the software himself. He also provided quality support for the software. Don't think that just b/c it's GPL'ed that someone can or will even provide the same level of support.

This same thing happened to the linux router project. And it's still dead. Yes everyone is replaceable, but someone highly qualified and actually helpful (without a jacka$$ ego) in the OSS world is a rare thing that should be appreciated.

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.

Re:Flaming Foobar

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Of course there will be OSS developers that get tired of donating huge chunks of their lives, but there will always be others who will step up and take their places.

Everyone is replacable (yeah, know, it sounds sad), but it's true (at least when it comes to OSS development).

I'm afraid that, one day, you'll eat those words.

I've been in a similar position to this guy, volunteering lots of my spare time to help a community I cared about but ultimately finding it too much. The one time I did say I'd like to stand down and pass the job on, no-one stepped up to take over, even among a group of very dedicated volunteers who each gave up a lot of their own time to help already. It was just too much at that time for anyone else to accept. It took a few more weeks of very hard work to clear up some of the bigger things and reduce the workload before I could find someone who was willing (though hardly enthusiastic) to take over, and I could hand the job on without feeling like I was dropping my friends and those I was supporting in the brown stuff.

"Everyone can be replaced" is a great sound-bite, until you're the one trying to find the replacement. Then it's simply wrong.

If the code is out there, free, someone else can pick it up and continue where the last person left off.

Sorry, but it really doesn't work that way. If the codebase is at all complicated, then even if it's pretty well-written and well-documented, you inevitably lose a lot if you bring in a new developer and don't have the old guy around to train him up. This is true whether your code is open source, closed source, shared source or tomato sauce. All you can do is hope that your code is well enough written and documented that the new guy can get the job done.

Re:Flaming Foobar

[AaronLawrence]

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.

Re:Flaming Foobar

[Allen Zadr]

Yes and no. Both are necessary, and often features that would be "wanted" at the User Guide level are both shaped, and or made redundant at the Requirements Document level.

Having very good "call" trees is even more important (for human portablility).

It's amazing how far a simple comment block can go if it's ACTUALLY kept up to date, and available on every function:

/**
** foo
** returns: int - value is a count of modified foo
** accepts: int foo - value initializes foo
** calls: foo.c:foohelper()
** called from: foo.c:main()
** - foo2.c:whatTheFoo()
** - foo2.c:fooYou()
** - foomodule.c:whereArtFoo()
*/

Re:Flaming Foobar

[bsartist]

You missed an important part: As a professional software developer, a great deal of your time will be spent getting paid to support, fix, and document code written by someone else.

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

So the myth is true? And that's ok.

[Viltvodlian Deoderan]

This was a bit of a surprise. After reading all the /. articles on this topic of late, I'd convinced myself that OSS developers really aren't people with a good heart and a lot of free time but are paid by big companies to work on strategicaly important software. This would sort of blatently contradict that idea

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.

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?

[hey!]

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.

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

bitten by the power of 3 rule

[timdaly]

effort to develop software

1 unit = code for yourself
3 units = code given to someone else (library probs, config probs)
9 units = code given to a group (HOWTO, ifdefs, tar-gzip, etc)
27 units = FOSS code (cvs, mailing list, configure, make, docs)
81 units = product code (legal, sales, market, packaging, distribution)
243 units = viable software for 30 years (literate pgms, deep documentation, research, major redesign, etc)

The effort to get real software to be viable is hard, long term, and thankless.
How much code are you writing that will be useful 30 years from now?
What are you doing to make that happen?

Let the distro documentation take care of it

[21chrisp]

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.

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

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.

Re:Perhaps it was lack of incentive

[dabrepus]

Google Answers does this.

shorewall rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

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. :-((

Re:Sounds like

[AmigaBen]

I agree. He simply comes off sounding like a whiner. If he was just tired of developing it, he should have said so. Instead, he blamed it on support and documention. That's an easy fix. Don't support it or document it.

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.

Shorewall isn't just another project

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So the myth is true? And that's ok.

[IamTheRealMike]

It depends a lot on what the project is, Shorewall clearly isn't one that has commercial backing (in which case the pain of support and documentation is balanced by money).

I work on two open source projects, one I do as a hobby and one I get paid for. For the one I get paid for, a significant chunk of time is spent doing technical support. This can be quite demoralising: there are always people for whom it simply Does Not Work and you aren't entirely sure why (usually because their system is broken or hopelessly exotic). But when you get a support ticket closed as fixed, it's quite a nice feeling. I wouldn't do it unless I was paid to though.

The one I don't get paid to work on, most of my time is spent on "boring" stuff as well like debugging, investigating other peoples goofs and writing documentation. I do that because I'm the maintainer and I like to see the project thrive and grow. It's like gardening. It can't all be planting pretty flowers all the time: somebody has to do the weeds. Well, that somebody is me, and the reward comes in the form of the final result rather than the process of getting there.

Lesson for Open Source?

[DaemonTW]

Maybe this is a good lesson we can all learn from and try to improve. How much OSS/FS are you using that you haven't contributed anything to? You don't have to be a programmer to help out, there's plenty of other tasks. You could:

• Contribute to the documentation
• Help by answering questions to mailing lists / forums
• Write a tutorial
• Offer to update the website design / content
• Write / add to the FAQ

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.

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.