Shorewall Developer Tom Eastep Quits 68
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?"
Re:No surprice here (Score:2)
Re:No surprice here (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No surprice here (Score:2)
Flaming Foobar (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:2)
Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:3, Insightful)
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:
Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:1)
--
Phil
Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:2)
Some stuff can be automated... However, in an Open Source Product, I've seen very, very few with well documented code.
Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:2)
Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:1)
Guess what? If you take a job as a professional software developer, a great deal of your time will be spent supporting, fixing, and documenting code written by someone else.
Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
yep, what if it had been a shareware developer (Score:2)
Now where are you?
Too bad... (Score:1, Interesting)
He needs to delegate (Score:2)
Unfortunately, this ensures that a lot of OSS will always be nerds-only.
Why write documentation at all? (Score:2, Flamebait)
(this might not work for small projects that nobody knows about, but once you've got a bit of mindshare, there shouldn't be a problem with slacking off in
Re:Why write documentation at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 spe
Re:Why write documentation at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why write documentation at all? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
So the myth is true? And that's ok. (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:So the myth is true? And that's ok. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ho
quite sad (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:quite sad (Score:1)
Thanks to Tom Eastep (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thanks to Tom Eastep (Score:2)
Re:Thanks to Tom Eastep (Score:2)
I just finished setting up Shorewall on my home server box and I have to say it was pretty painless. Lots of information and documentation, great website, and great software.
Thanks Tom.
Sounds like (Score:1)
Re:Sounds like (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Sounds like (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like (Score:1)
I wasn't being overly dismissive. The developer, on the other hand, seems to have been. He dismissed an entire project that you claim he wasn't tired of developing, simply because somehow he couldn't figure out how to NOT answer support questions?
Re:Sounds like (Score:2)
To say that there was nothing much compelling him to support those people ignores two things:
- On many an open source project like this there isn't anyone else to do the support. If you don't do the support and people start rubbishing your project as people are wont to do (look at how often it happens here on
- This is a committed guy who has obviously been in the game for a long time. Personal and P
bitten by the power of 3 rule (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
ke
Writing is a VERY difficult mental challenge. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:2)
My friend and coworker Ronny asked him a silly question. Rich says "OK Ronny, I feel this is a simple question you could answer yourself if you spent 5 minutes looking in the manual. If you don't value my time, I do, and that answer will cost you a beer". Ronny thinks about it, and says "OK". Rich tells him, for one Sam Adams. Hmm, Ronny thinks of another question, asks Rich, Rich says "Ronny, that's in the same category. A simpl
Re:Perhaps it was lack of incentive (Score:2, Funny)
The price of fame? (Score:2)
It's going to be the price of popularity.
I've been subscribed to the Debian users list for years. They get a lot of mail, but most of it is from users who generally score above the baboon on the UF intelligence test [userfriendly.org]. In short, they are generally technically adept questions that have some thought behind them. Not all, but a lot of them.
I spend a year subscribed to the SuSE users list and have quite a different impression. They score around mollusk. The questions are the most annoying and obvious quest
shorewall rocks (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Just provide the Software... (Score:2)
Any developer worth their salt will be able to figure out how to use it simply by reading the code.
Re:Just provide the Software... (Score:2)
don't develop docs - develop UIs (Score:1)
Re:Can't cope (Score:1)
He has something to complain about, if he has to use a breathing-aid for sleep
Ever ran a OSS-project on your own?
For more than a few months?
Successfully?
Healthy?
---
I respect his step.
Re:Can't cope (Score:2)
Re:Can't cope (Score:1)
Re:Can't cope (Score:2)
Where did I say Tom hadn't done a fantastic job?
Where did I say he wasn't devoted to his work?
What I did say was that, as a human being, he needs to learn how to cope or the world will eat him alive.
It's the same thing all of us deal with. I went through it in my profession, and most people (unless they're pampered) go through it in theirs. Some people learn to cope and go on to be successful. Some people don't learn to cope, burn up, and drop out.
Note
Shorewall isn't just another project (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Lesson for Open Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to judge people. I'm guilty myself of not contributing much back to