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

[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

[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: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

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?

[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?

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.