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Shorewall Developer Tom Eastep Quits 68

Posted by timothy from the priorities-shift dept.
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?"
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Shorewall Developer Tom Eastep Quits More

Shorewall Developer Tom Eastep Quits

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  • Flaming Foobar (Score:5, Insightful)

    by myspys ( 204685 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @09:22AM (#12565710) Homepage
    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 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Intron ( 870560 )
      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

      • Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:3, Interesting)

        by WetCat ( 558132 )
        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...
      • I've often said we should start by writing a User's Guide for each application we create, not a Requirements Document.

        • Re:Flaming Foobar (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Allen Zadr ( 767458 ) *
          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

          • Holy lord, why isn't your IDE doing this? Mine is.

            --
            Phil
            • Mine doesn't - but even if it did, I'd still have to deal with keeping everything up-to-date when dealing with submitted patches, etc.

              Some stuff can be automated... However, in an Open Source Product, I've seen very, very few with well documented code.

              • I don't think he meant your IDE writing that block for you. I think he meant your IDE retrieving that information for you. Tools to get a list of callers/calless from code have existed for decades. Listing the parameters of a function is even easier. The only thing you're missing is the description of what each parameter does, which a) the need for can be vastly reduced with careful naming and b) can be easily documented per-parameter, and a good IDE/object browser can even show you those comments. If
      • 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.

        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.

        • 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:Flaming Foobar (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dcowart ( 13321 ) <dzcowart@COWgmail.com minus herbivore> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @10:00AM (#12566047) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:2, Informative)

        by myspys ( 204685 )
        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @10:26AM (#12566346)
      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.

      • 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.
    • You've been dutifully registering ever major version of the software and you're pumped because the next version is supposed to have some features you really want. Alas, the developer decides that he's not making enough money or is just bored with the project and gives up on it.

      Now where are you?

  • Too bad... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Stop Error ( 823742 )
    It's too bad that he couldn't find some one to help him. Shame to see good software die of frustration.
  • We can't all be RMS (thank God). Do what you can, and if your users need more, some of them will have to step up to the plate and contribute. If the software is important enough to enough people then it will get done.

    Unfortunately, this ensures that a lot of OSS will always be nerds-only.

  • If you hate writing documentation, why not simply Don't Do It? I've seen plenty of good OSS software out there with crappy documentation. In these cases, if the software is good enough, other people recognize the need and fill in with their own user-generated documentation, and this eventually is as good as most people need. It's the open-source way.

    (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

    • 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 spe
    • 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 wor

    • 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.
  • 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

    • 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 ho

  • quite sad (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am not a shorewall user, but it seems to be a good tool.

    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.
    • "Perhaps an organization could be formed with the sole purpose of writing docs for OSS projects." PREACH THE GOSEPL BROTHER On my project @ libspf.org, I've spent several orders of magnitude more time monkeying around with documentation, and autocrap, far more so than I ever have actually writing code. Its disgusting. An organization that could perform the above service for OSS projects would be a fucking godsend although its probably quite unrealistic.

  • Thanks to Tom Eastep (Score:5, Informative)

    by gregorlowski ( 884938 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @10:05AM (#12566120)
    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!!!
  • he needed some other people to take care of the other stuff while he did development.

    • Re:Sounds like (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AmigaBen ( 629594 )
      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

      • He wasn't tired of developing it, he was tired of supporting people who expected him to answer everything little thing they couldn't be arsed lookig up. I get the impression he would have been happy enough concentrating on the development, possibly with some assistance. Calling him a whiner is overly dismissive.
        • Did you bother to read my post? There was -nothing- compelling him to support the people who expected him to answer every little thing they couldn't be arsed to look up. That was very much the point of my post.

          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?

          • No I just randomly pecked out a response, happened to hit your post to reply to.

            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 /.) it can end up a failure.
            - 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)

    by timdaly ( 539918 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @10:40AM (#12566495)
    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?

  • 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)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @11:06AM (#12566746) Homepage

    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)

    by ancientt ( 569920 ) <ancientt@yahoo.com> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @11:10AM (#12566791) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Back in school, the local Mac wizard was named Rich. He loved his beer.

      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
    • Google Answers does this.

  • 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)

    by 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. :-((

  • ... and leave off the support, documentation, and website. That would save a lot of time and effort.

    Any developer worth their salt will be able to figure out how to use it simply by reading the code.
  • I hate writing documentation too. So when I notice that I'm getting a lot of support questions for a feature, I like to tweak the UI so it's more intuitive. Eventually the confusion disappears due to better UI design.

  • Shorewall isn't just another project (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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
  • 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

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