Linux Router Project Dead 835
An anonymous reader submits: "The Linux Router Project is no more. This single-floppy distro was a great tool for building a number of simple super-low-cost network devices. The maintainer has a lot of bitter words about its demise, and it is sad to see it go."
Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it is explicit in the GPL, you release your stuff under it and on the one hand you can build on the work of all the others before you by incorporating any other GPL stuff, and on the other hand you really do lose control of your own code. That's the deal to get access to the growing body of great works that are available in the GPL already.
Reading between the lines, this guy is tired of not having enough money to get by, and the whole goodbye message is mainly a plea to some company to set him up with a job to keep it going. I can very much understand that and I hope this comes true for him, and it might if some companies are actually reliant on his code. But because of the inherent loss of control, its very difficult to translate even a great GPL project into a paycheck.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
It's constantly amazing to me too how many of the Gnu-Uber-Alles folks don't really understand that they are giving their work away for free and can not reasonably expect anything in return. Not a salary, not an occasional trip, not even acknowledgement. Free means free, you can't expect jack in return. Those are the terms you choose when you use the GPL!
Feeling otherwise really is just feeling proprietary, like the fruits of your work is your property and you can expect something in return. Sorry, that's not what the GPL is about, the GPL is about giving up any control you have over how the result is used or how (or whether) you are compensated (beyond the GPL). The "freedom" isn't for the creator of the new work, the freedom is for the users to not owe you a damned thing in return.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who expects to get anything more is living in hope. They shouldn't be surprised if they get nothing, and they should be pleasently surprised if they recieve something in return.
Wouldn't BSD license be worse? (Score:4, Interesting)
With BSD-style licenses, commercial companies can use your code without having to distribute the source. Your hard work can then be used by a company to profit without any acknowledgement of the true author of the code.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
but/and
when your code is closed, while you may not be giving your code away for free, you are often giving away control/rights/trademarks to the company you work for(and since they likely want young programmers that are paid dirt cheap...)
anyways,
going the GPL route is no substitute for business sense.
If you are a great coder, but have lousy business sense, and lousy people skills, and your primary goal is to make money...then go work for a company.
If you are a great coder, have good business sense, and good people skills and money takes a back seat to other things....then the GPL can be a good thing.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Interesting)
You are quite wrong about that. Giving away code means gaining fame - that is, if the code is good. With enough fame, you can write your own ticket.
In today's world, fame is bankable, make no mistake about it. Now, take note that this only addresses the money factor. Giving away code - good code - has many other benefits:
- Gain respect from your peers
- Social aspects - make useful contacts, meet like-minded people
- Improve your skills
- Take advantage of the debugging/design power of peer review
- Forestall possible attempts by others to patent ideas you've discovered independently
- People will send you free computers
- If you're good enough, expect to be invited to join organizations, speak at events, etc - it's fun.
And so on.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like this guy got all of the publicity and free computers that he wanted, but he STILL wasn't bringing in enough money to pay his bills.
His example is a good one to remember when deciding whether or not to open source your software projects. If you don't have enough money to eat or pay rent, NO amount of coding skills or respect from your peers is going to allow you to program for a project that isn't bringing in any revenue!
I think that everyone can agree that this guy seriously needs a day job. He should work on the Linux Router project in his spare time, but make sure that he has the money coming in to pay those bills.
Hopefully, some Slashdot reader can provide him with a position.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Interesting)
I use LRP as my router/firewall to connect my home network to my cable modem. One MAJOR problem I have with it is that I can't get my home -> work VPN connection to setup through my LRP box. After much googleing I have found that it is possible, but the mechanism to do it is sufficiently beyond me and my wife would not appreciate hours and hours of down time while I fiddle with it. I would have gladly payed for a preconfigured floppy, CD, flash drive (preferrably flash drive because it's just cool!) to get me going...
It's too bad really, LRP is VERY god at what it does. I for one will miss it.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
No it's not. When was the last time you paid your rent in fame? "Sir, your rent of $900 was due 3 days ago." "Will you take 'fame'? I did write the utlity blahblahblah" No. Fame has nothing to do with money. That's the whole point of this article. This guy wrote something very cool, but cool doesn't pay your bills. I don't care if Michael Jackson came into my store. He's still gotta pay with cash, check, or major credit card. Him being famous doesn't help me to pay my phone bill.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. Additionally, fame+money is very rare in society. Most millionaires are savvy businessmen almost no one has never heard of, and, quite honestly, most millionaires are simply regular people who had unique insight and were willing to take a risk. Fame equals money only in the eyes of the likes of CNN (movie deals for Jessica Lynch...blecch), which applies to only a small number of people each year.
Truth is there can be only so many famous people, before the "audience" becomes saturated and looks elsewhere. If there were 500 "boy bands" instead of several, would the phenomenon of "boy bands" have ever occurred? (whether they should have been successful is for another thread at another time...)
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Funny)
  - Gain respect from your peers
  - Social aspects - make useful contacts, meet like-minded people
  - Improve your skills
  - Take advantage of the debugging/design power of peer review
  - Forestall possible attempts by others to patent ideas you've discovered independently
  - People will send you free computers
  - If you're good enough, expect to be invited to join organizations, speak at events, etc - it's fun.
All this for only 3 easy payments of 19.95. Call now! Don't delay! In fact, if you call in the next 10 minutes, you'll recieve a complimentary AOL disk at no extra charge*. It's our gift to you. Call now!
*Some exceptions may apply, batteries not included, void where prohibited and in Alaska Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Your biases are showing (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems to me this says a whole lot more about you and what you want to know than it does about the licenses.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:4, Insightful)
What you describe is called public domain software. The GPL imposes several key restrictions, and more importantly, it does not remove any of the default restrictions of copyright law unless you agree to the terms of the GPL.
If what you say were true, then distributing under the GPL and distributing as public domain would be the same thing. Such is not the case. I cannot take a GPLed work and use it in proprietary software (legally, we'll ignore the illegal case, since there are no limits on what you can do illegally, and there's no difference between public domain, GPLed, BSD-licensed or proprietary software in that respect).
I cannot print a GPLed program in most magazines without permission, for example, because most magazines stipulate that you may not reproduce them. That's a MAJOR restriction on distribution that I have control over as a source code author.
Please revise your usage of the word "any".
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
If you give others the power to make derivative works you're giving up any power over the code. It's so obvious to most other people. The GPL is all about destroying intellectual property rights in software. Controlling other people's usage is what property rights are all about.
=sniff= =sniff= Man, what is that I smell? Oh... SCO Employees^wTrolls! GPL works *because* of intellectual property rights. It in fact protects them quite strenuously. Read the actual GPL and you will find handlers for Patents, Copyrights, everything is there. The fact an author retains copyright is what gives the GPL teeth.
If I write something and distribute it under the GPL I am controlling what you can do with the code through the license. If you fail to abide by its terms you violate copyright law. This is something the SCO lawyers/FUDMonkeys fail to understand. Then again their education is not comparable to the real 5th grade education required to grok the GPL.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
WRONG!
This is one of the most blaintant myths of the GPL. You are NOT required to give your work away to anyone. You are only required to give the source to those that you give the binaries to. So if I give Cmdr Taco a binary of GPL code, I am only required to give Cmdr Taco the source if he asks. You can ask me all you want, but there is nothing in the GPL that requires me to give you the code or binaries if you ask. I am only required to give you the source if I happen to give (or sell) you the binary.
This also means that, if I use GPL code at work and don't distribute it, I am not required to give any of it away. This includes using GPL code on a server that is used by others, including customers.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
> the binaries to.
This is noteworthy, because it has an impact on the ecconomics of
distributing GPL stuff. You do NOT have to maintain a public
distribution system for everyone. Most distros do, but it's not
required. For example, if a hardware OEM wants to sell computers
that run OSS, including a lot of GPL'd software, they can do that
_without_ providing any public download site, provided the
computers they sell include on the hard drive (or CD or whatever)
the source for all the GPL'd software that is included.
Whether doing it that way would result in the best PR is a separate
question, but the GPL allows it.
In addition to the source, of course, you also have to give the
*license* to the people you give the binaries (or source) to, and
the nature of the license is such that they can then pass it along
to others. But they do that at their expense; you don't have to
pay for the bandwidth.
Re:Live by the GPL, die by the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think the only money in software is selling the binary, you are again, lost. Try getting some free support on MS windows or MS office, etc. Try getting some free training for windows or office, etc.
GPL has nothing to do with copyright which means you still have the right to sell that software and anything else just like anyone else. If you suck and are not even the best coder on your own creation, thats your fault. Blah blah blah, enough talking with you. I will not be egged on with such foolishness.
Re:Creating cashflow (Score:5, Informative)
The LRP is dead, long live LEAF [leaf-project.org] - The Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall, based on LRP, with extended Firewall features, and based on Linux 2.4 (i.e. with stateful packet filtering).
Woohoo!
Re:Creating cashflow (Score:5, Interesting)
The main one is that they are desperate not to get involved in any sort of money-laundering or porn scam - to the point that a single complaint (even anonymous) can get an account (potentially containing thousands of dollars) "frozen" until you prove your innocence; sometimes they just won't give a reason, and your money is just locked for months while they perform their own investigations.
The second is an extension - paypal reserve the right to pull cash directly from any bank account or CC you give them if (in *their* opinion) they are justified in doing so. you get no appeal from them and there is no regulatory body to complain to (paypal are careful to stay outside of the criteria that would make them a regulated bank; they are simply "agents" for the financial transactions, although exactly how that works if you have $20,000 in their possession (paid by your customers but not forwarded to you) for months at their whim is a little difficult for me to figure..)
There are other issues (like the privacy ones) but those are the main two.
This is no surpise... (Score:4, Funny)
In all seriousness though, it's sad to see a good project go.
A better alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A better alternative (Score:5, Funny)
In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Informative)
LRP == R.I.P. (1997-2002)
With great pain, I must now state:
The operating system that helped to create the embedded Linux marketplace, the Linux Router Project (LRP), is dead.
As of January of this year I have finally accepted the fact I will likely never be able to develop LRP into the operating system it could have been. A full 6 months later I'm forcing myself to update this page to reflect this. It is not an easy thing to give up on your life's work.
I am also now semi-retired as a computer engineer. Aside from my general disgust at the computing industry and what the Internet has become, scrambling around for scrapes of work and praying for the next good money project that eventually ends suddenly in a few months, just isn't keeping food on the table. I've looked quite a bit for some stable work, but plumbers make more hourly then Sys Admins in South Florida. Either I move to California (never!) or move on. I am now reserved to do the latter. With LRP remaining an unachievable goal I don't even feel much desire to work with computers anymore.
My many contributions to the computing community has reaped very little personal benefit for myself. As I now struggle to pay the bills I can not help but feel quite pissed off at the state of affairs, for myself and the other authors who contributed massive amounts of time and quality work, only to have it whored by companies not willing to give back dime one to the people that actually created what it is they sell. Acknowledgement and referral would have at least been acceptable. Few companies do even that.
Care to tell me what Embeddix (for one) is based off of? Ever offer me work Caldera? Even when I asked?
Well actually I'm glad they didn't as I would hate to think I could have benefited those scumbags any further...but I think you, the reader, gets the point I'm making.
Some companies did contribute directly to the project. However a few thousand dollars or a few computers does not let a programmer eat next month. As desperately as I have tried for the last 4 years I have been unable to get any type of sustainable funding for LRP development or steady work which would allow such. (It might have happened late in 2001, but after many 100 hour weeks of coding....that contract was terminated and so were any hopes of dedicating future time to LRP development.)
I actually have done more work on LRP 5.0 then anyone has seen. Yes LRP *5.0*. LRP 4.0 was brought to an alpha stage January 2001 and I was not happy with it. It was a gorgeous rehash of the same old Unix shit. Not acceptable to me. I began to explore some ideas I previously had but thought were not realistic to pursue. They instead turned out to be ideal.
This operating system had a good deal of specifications outlined for it and some preliminary proof-of-concept coding done. To this day I am only beginning to see very minor bits of what I had expected to have in production the summer of 2001. You see, unlike the current pile of Linux distributions which are based on ~20 year old obsolete mechanisms, I was working on something that was from scratch. How different would it have been?
* A new shell (no bash, no ash, no sh at all!)
* A new shell scripting language
* A new (universal) packaging scheme (would retrofit other OSes)
* A true application management system
* A new core process management system (No 'init' here...)
That's just a short list from memory, for the sake of making people ill with longing. (YES, YES, Burn with desire! Muhahaha!) Even the syntax for the scripting language was designed. The full architecture for the packaging system was laid out. Oh yeah, and the base of this OS would have all fit in ~8MB of space. The name of this operating system and it's specifications, shall still remain UNRELEASED.
Unfortunately it's not going to happen. Wish it could. I'd like to hope someone with 6 figure$ to burn wants this to happen, but I need to grow up and move o
Re:In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it is time to let someone with an interest in maintaining the current codebase take it over. Doesn't sound like it would take much effort at this point other than backporting the occasional fix for an exploit.
Re:In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Insightful)
How much more do I have to say before it becomes obvious that expecting this (and "punishing" us by not releasing what you *have* done for another developer to persue) is about the least mature thing I have seen from any developer *ever*?
If this is how you approach life, it's no wonder people are in no hurry to give you $100,000, guy. But all that aside, what entitles you to $100,000, when so many more competent and qualified developers go unpaid? what makes you so much better than they are, Mr. Cinege?
Mod me a troll if you must. Whether you want to admit it or not, "Dave" is being as unreasonable as anybody I have ever seen before. That sort of logic will not get you far in the business world when you want to put food on the table and pay the rent. There's nothing more to say.
Pay more attention to the details and .... (Score:5, Informative)
LRP == R.I.P. (1997-2002)
Thus he spent alot more than 6 months on the project... it was 5 years!
Re:In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Funny)
Rather than post what you wrote, all I can say is "Bravo!"
This guy'll be sitting on a park bench 10 years from now ranting and raving about his operating system that moved away from all that Unix shit as he feeds the pigeons and drinks his Thunderbird...
Re:In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it is more like 6 YEARS, which is a significant time spent on a project. And ya, he does come off as a bit pissy, but ya know what, cut the man some slack... He spent a long time doing something that(even if he shouldn't have) he thought would lead to an income, or atleast, he thought it SHOULD lead to one given the interests corporations have had in his project.
It is GPLed software, and that is how it goes sometimes, a company can 'steal' your project code and not hire you or pay homage to your hardwork, that pissed this guy off.
Re:In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the crux.. and many MANY programmers just for some reason cannot grasp the concept...
If you GPL it, you should be doing so out of the desire to give back to the planet. Linux certianly didnt release Linux as a "I'm gonna get rich off this!" and he certianly isn't bill gates because of it. John Hall isnt in the kernel for the Money and glory...
When a project goes to pot because of reasons OTHER than the GPL and most everyone leaves it, the lead developer usually get's really pissy, and i can understand that, but they either never understood the GPL or they forgot why they GPL'd it in the first place.
Dont forget why you GPL'd in the first place. and do NOT be bitter when "suprise" corperate america sodomizes you.... as no company can be trusted for any reason... they are ouyt for one thing, profits... not for advancing the common good.
Name change (Score:5, Funny)
So he did he finally get around to legally changing his name to Linux Torvalds! I knew if would happen eventually. Now if only he could change that "Torvalds" to something catchier and sexier... perhaps "de Beaumarche".
Re:In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Funny)
But it was not to be (ominous music returns). David Cinege returned to his basement in Dulls-ells Street in Peterborough, at 9:05 a.m., exactly the same time as every other morning!
(door opens)
"Morning, David"
"Morning, Mum"
David's Mum, a middle age but still attractive schoolteacher, couldn't help noticing the complete absence of tiny but tell-tale blood stains on her son's clothing. Nor did she notice anything strange in Mr. Cinege's behaviour that whole morning. Nor the next morning. Nor at any time before or since the entire period since David began his odd morning journeys to the mailbox.
"Have we any more frosted pop-tarts, Mum?"
"Yes, they're over there, David."
(faintly) "Oh..."
But for the lack of any untold circumstances for his mum to notice, and the total non-involvement of Mr. Cinege in anything illegal, the forweight of the law would insure that David "piss off" Cinege would have ended up like all who challenge the fundamental laws of our society. In an iron coffin with spikes on the inside.
Re:In before slashdotting! (Score:5, Insightful)
Running a successful free software project buys you many demanding "followers" and then you have to choose: You can become a disliked "capitalist" by rejecting feature requests unless you're getting paid to implement them or someone else volunteers to implement them. Or you risk losing momentum by saying no whenever you feel you can't justify the amount of work. Or you are a "nice" person and answer support requests, implement feature requests, fix bugs and generally do everything your "followers" demand from you -- and burn out.
There are people who can't say no. A programmer who doesn't get paid for his open source work has more important things to do. And thus, for a volunteering open source programmer, nothing is as important a character trait as being able to say no. Otherwise you end up having to say no to the whole project, and for a person who is used to caving in to external demands that must be a terrible situation.
These people are responsible for many great free programs. But at some point they realize that they can't justify the dedication they put into these programs and since they don't know how to continue working on them with less dedication, they end the project. It is important to realize that as long as they are with the project, these people are the most dedicated open source programmers, therefore they don't deserve your "no sympathy" ranting. He is now in the state of mind which you demand of him. He is now at the point where he actually realizes that putting food on the table, that paying the rent is more important than pleasing many ungrateful "followers" and that the project is not going to pay his expenses. He values his dedication to the project with the payment for a qualified full-time job. That's not your judgement to make. He can't get in return what he expected, so he finally says no. His gain is many people's loss, so there will be a lot of bitching.
Whey, what an ego! (Score:5, Interesting)
The point about GPL is that you can't get ripped off. If they rip you off, you can force them to release their derivative work also as GPL. If he chose the wrong license, he got what he deserved.
I put my embedded work under GPL and actually managed to get some funding. If it's GPL, people have to talk to you to use it commercially, you know? That's the beauty of GPL.
Anyway, I can't say I found LRP to be as great as this guy actually thinks it is. And this childish "look what you missed" bullshit is not going to get him anywhere either. The world is full of companies who are not making any money, Caldera and Lineo being two very good examples he cites himself. Don't expect them to pay you if they don't have to.
So far, almost every company that hired has tried to rip me off in the end. That's how it goes. So choose wisely, chose GPL.
BTW: A new init system? Got one of those as well [www.fefe.de]... I even wrote my own libc [www.fefe.de]. And you know what? People are helping with the projects, in fact, many people are helping me with the projects. Feel free to look at all the names in the dietlibc CHANGES file! I think it's how you treat people that makes them help you. If your code is readable and you treat people well, they will help. You won't get big front page articles on Wired, but you'll create a damn good project, people will know your name. And you will get invited, too! Meet me at Linuxtag 2003 [linuxtag.de]!
Re:Whey, what an ego! (Score:5, Interesting)
He probably can't get a job because no sane employer would go near him. Before he started work on LRP, he was quite active on Usenet in the legal and taxes groups, talking about how the IRS is not really a government agency, and you don't have to pay income taxes, and all the usual bullshit, complete with the usual mishmash of quotes from court cases that turn out to be at best out of context, and at worst blatant fabrications, when you go to the library and read the actual court opinion.
If he actually follows through with his beliefs in real life, as opposed to just arguing them on Usenet, he would want his employer to pay him in gold or silver, not be willing to supply a taxpayer ID number, and not allow any withholding.
Would you put up with that hassle if you were an employer? I wouldn't.
Re:Whey, what an ego! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Whey, what an ego! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Whey, what an ego! (Score:5, Informative)
Yikes! (Score:5, Interesting)
1 - He is more than a little unstable.
2 - The internet can be a dangerous place.
Don't worry Dave, if you can't find work then someone, somewhere is holding a padded cell just for you.
Re:Whey, what an ego! (Score:4, Informative)
No, they don't. Read sections 2 and 3 of the GPL (version 2) again. Carefully. The FSF's short write-up on selling GPL'ed software [fsf.org] might come as something of a surprise to some folks who've not taken the time to look into it.
Placing software under the GPL helps to ensure that it will remain free and that the author will retain the copyright, but it doesn't guarantee that anyone will come offering money to use it. So long as the next person/company down the line abides by the terms of the GPL regarding copyright notices and source code availability the original author isn't automatically entitled to any monetary compensation.
GPL'ed stuff has been a part of some commercial products for a while now. Bundling useful GPL stuff with a Non-GPL proprietary product is a way to provide customers with a set of useful tools which enjoy a wide base of support. WindRiver's V5.1 VxWorks RTOS development suite for SunOS/Solaris is a case in point. And it's perfectly OK under the GPL so long as there's a clear seperate between the GPL and Non-GPL code. GPL code can form the basis for a viable commercial product, even if the source must be readily available, since the number of people with the skills and/or resources to duplicate the derivative work will undoubtedly be much less than those who just want to make use of it without poking under the hood. And for those who do want to poke around, more power to them.
A good example of a commercial product built on Linux and GPL'ed code is Tivo [tivo.com]. You can download the source and fiddle around with it if you want to. Has that stopped Tivo from making money? No. Do they pay royalties or other monies back to the original authors of the GPL'ed code? Only if they feel inclined to do so. I don't know if they do or not.
IMHO the LRP died not for lack of technical elegance or application potential, but more for lack of marketing inspiration. Placing a project under the GPL means that one must think about capitalizing on the free distribution and the exposure offered by the open source environment. It's my considered opinion that unless one is willing to offering consulting services, custom modifications, or a useful product in a nicely packaged form ready for use, then just GPL'ing something and expecting the bucks to start rolling in when someone else picks it up and runs with it is only somewhat less realistic than buying weekly lottery tickets and hoping to hit the jackpot.
The alternative, and naive, view that GPL means that it's all free (as in free beer), while wrong according to the FSF, is perhaps a more kindly and community-minded take on it. But it too will lead to starvation just as quickly as unrealistic expectations of income.
So if someone takes some GPL'ed code, modifies it to suit their needs, puts it on a nice silk-screened CD, writes a manual and makes money off of it, then so long as they also make the sources available to the purchaser and keep the copyright notices intact, about the only thing the original author can say is "Shucks, I should have thought of that".
Re:Whey, what an ego! (Score:5, Insightful)
So the fact remains, if someone wants to make money selling my software (and I'm not talking about Red Hat or other distributors of my software here), he needs to talk to me.
Also, I wonder what you mean by "poor". I have a nice little family, can pay my bills, and get paid doing what I like to do -- what more could I possibly want from life? I don't have to be a millionaire. To me it's more about what remains when you die, and when I die, I will leave some offspring and some (fine?) free software behind. What (besides some mediocre slashdot trolls) are you planning to leave behind for future generations?
Re:Whey, what an ego! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whey, what an ego! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I wonder what you mean by "poor". I have a nice little family, can pay my bills, and get paid doing what I like to do -- what more could I possibly want from life? I don't have to be a millionaire. To me it's more about what remains when you die, and when I die, I will leave some offspring and some (fine?) free software behind. What (besides some mediocre slashdot trolls) are you planning to leave behind for future generations?
Many here could only dream of being so rich as that.
I can see his point but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Get a real job - in computing or otherwise, and if you want to write a "router on a disk" in your spare time, then go for it. If you don't want to, let someone else take it over.
Re:I can see his point but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm wondering about this. I've never read the GPL with much attention, but as the owner of the code and license he could actually release works based off a GPL'ed project (that he owns) as non-GPL? What about the contributions by others? Would he not have to get the others to agree on a change of license?
I don't think, according to the GPL, it's that easy to just close your GPL'ed source. Does the GPL state that if you (completely) own the code, you
Re:I can see his point but... (Score:4, Interesting)
You obviously have never been in a meeting with the senior management for any large tech corporation, have you?
Or, you could just ask anyone who has/had to field tech support calls from their own customers. Customers, for the most part, don't know what the fuck they are talking about when it comes to technical matters. Slashdot users are not your atypical customers, trust me, you folks can at least figure things out provided you're given the right bits of information to work off of.
In addition to all of this, what the fuck does the programmers opinion of the customers even matter? Is the customer *ever* going to have to deal with the programmer in a support situation? In a corporate environment I would highly doubt it.
Hell, I would let the guy have a HUGE poster in his cube that said:
"The customer is wrong, bitch!"
So long as he met his project targets and his code worked well.
Now if the programmer goes public with his sentiments that the customers are idiots while working for my company then his opinion becomes a problem because it is now a PR disaster that has to either get spun somehow or I now have to punish him somehow in a public way so it looks like I am giving a shit about my customers opinions (even if I agree with my employee that they are idiots...but they are the idiots who eventually pay both our checks).
So yeah, basically, the problem is customers are idiots whom you have to keep around otherwise you're out of a job at some point.
Unless your the CEO or senior management and then you just fuck over your lower pleeb employees but sucking your fat golden parachute out of the company pension fund or some equally horrendous lack of moral pulchritude.
And people think I am too pessimistic/sarcastic for someone who is 27. To them I say, work in the tech sector for the last 10 years and try to not turn out even MORE sarcastic/pessimistic then I. If you do find someone who turned out less sarcastic then me, he is lying to himself and therefore ergo must be in sales. Bastards.
Sponsorships? (Score:5, Interesting)
What happened to all these sponsorships?
Re:Sponsorships? (Score:3, Funny)
The first of many (Score:4)
What's that smell? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What's that smell? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's never a good idea to kill off a project (programming or other) when you're emotional about it - you'll always manage to say something that will come back to haunt you, or people will get entirely the wrong idea about you...
Better to chill out, get out of the house, go sit on a beach for a while with a beer in hand, and when you're all mellow and relaxed, write something that's perhaps a bit less melodramatic.
N.
Is it just me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it would have been great. But all I see is him claiming he was going to throw out most of the core utilities. This in and itself doesn't make anything great. It's only great if whatever replaces them is so much better that it was worth the effort doing it. Otherwise, it really is just reinventing the wheel.
Perhaps I don't have enough perspective on the LRP to understand why this is such a big deal, but reading the page leads me to believe that the LRP had become one of those projects that was much, much more ambitious than it needed to be. Projects like that will always have a hard time surviving. Sure, it's tragic that programmers have a hard time finding work, and that companies who freely sell and profit from Linux have a hard time "giving back" to the open source programmers who made it possible. On the other hand, I find it difficult to morn a project that, so far as I can tell from what little I see on that exit letter, was something that was neither practical nor maybe even particularly necessary.
-Rob
I can partially agree... (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the particularly necessary part. I would have to argue that LRP was extremely useful in helping Linux penetrate the embedded systems market. The original idea was to get all the cool features of the kernel and just enough OS to be useful on a floppy. Once someone got it working, and working well, it was suddenly very easy to offer your [insert generic internet object] with routing/firewalling/web-based configuration stuff. All you really had to do was add one of the many excellent tiny webservers, and a pile of cgi-scripts to generate the config files from the forms and call
Getting a barebones-but-configurable linux out there spawned piles of projects for embedding it, like remote data collection, PDA O/Ss, net-boot computers, and piles of 'reuse' projects for PCs that couldn't/wouldn't have a hard drive in them.
In summary, I don't know what his latest rev. would have contributed, but LRP was the start of something cool that we now seem to take for granted. Me more than most people. As I hit submit my old 200Mhz/hard-driveless/cdromless LRP router (up for 4560h now) will pass the packets to
Open Source Burnout (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe I'll start a counselling centre for desperate OSS programmers...
Q. I feel inadequate, I have thousands of users asking for features, but I can't deliver _and_ keep my family fed. -- Frantic, IL
Dear Frantic,
Even the best software companies take their time adding features. Don't believe everything you hear about "internet time". Good products of any kind take years to build. Relax. Take your time.
Q. I'm working all my free time on project X, but no-one seems to care. Sure, my users love it, but in job interviews, it's worth nothing. -- Pissed Off, CA
Dear Off (or should I call you Pissed?),
Don't confuse art and business, and for that matter, don't mix them either. OSS is art, you do it because it makes you feel great. Only if you are a truly great artist will people appreciate your work, and you usually have to die first. Get a day job on other merits - perhaps a nice tie - and do your art when the inspiration takes you.
Q. how do I make money from my OSS project? -- Destidude, NY
Dear Destidude,
Money? Did you start it for money? Nah. You started it because you thought "hey, I can do that?" Let me remind you of a basic rules of business: if you want to make money, find a group who have money to spend and make something they want. Who are you selling to? Do they have money? Right. Now stop complaining and change your CV to include "Open Source Migration Consultant".
well.. in other news.. (Score:4, Funny)
I can't say I'm entirely without sympathy (Score:5, Insightful)
Look don't get me wrong, the computing economy sucks these days, yeah. Workers are treated like crap if
But come on man, if you're reading this, don't blast so many people on your way out who, if anything, were more generous than they needed to be. Well, except Caldera. *wink*
And don't complain if you're not making money because you're giving your only product away. Like the adage about the tramp who wants God to make him win the lottery, meet him halfway and buy the friggin ticket
Why not a router distro on a bootable cdrom? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not a router distro on a bootable cdrom? (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it as the same reason a Cisco 2600 eDonkey client isn't out yet.
However, you do have a cool idea. There are tons of people that would benefit from an easy cd-based distro with firewalling capabilities, plus use the extra room on the CD to store files for an un-corruptable file or webserver installation. Have all logging go to a syslog server of your choice.
I guess something like that would be like: download this
Do it up. I'm sure it's been done, but do it better.
Why not read a review of it? (Score:3, Informative)
Alternatives to linuxrouter project (Score:4, Informative)
Consulting can pay the bills (Score:5, Informative)
The way I have been getting by is working as a consultant for remote clients. I also did it for a couple years before I moved away from California. Now, it's more difficult than holding a regular job, and it's not secure, but it has many advantages, one of which is that you can live in a nice place - for example, Not In Silicon Valley.
I'm sorry to see the LRP die. I subscribed to the list around the time I moved to Maine, and I think they're a great bunch of people. But I don't believe that there's no way that one can make a living in programming anymore.
If I can do it from Maine, he can do it from Florida.
Since I left California, I haven't had any clients from anywhere near where I lived. They've been from Kansas, New Jersey, The Bahamas, California, and Ontario. Just last week I got inquiries from Germany and Taiwan.
If you want to know how I find clients, read Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants [goingware.com], How to Promote Your Business on the Internet [goingware.com] and You Can Help by Referring Clients [goingware.com].
It's certainly not easy, in fact it's downright crazy sometimes, but I have been working steadily throughout the economic downturn, I still own my house, and I eat more or less regularly.
And I live in a nice place.
hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yak, yak, yak. Get a job!"
It reminds me of the developer of the compiler LCC who got really pissed off that no-one was buying his pay-for version. I emailed him, and pointed out that either he was doing LCC because he loved to write it, in which case money was a bonus, not a necessity even if that meant writing it in his spare time, OR he was just writing it to make money, in which case: deal with the harsh reality, you can't make a living off it, do something else.
I belive that advice would serve this guy well too.
graspee
zero sympathy (Score:4, Insightful)
the childishly worded tell off doesn't help. oh yes, we will burn with desire, and the world will indeed be desolate without your new shell.
i think that anyone who cares about Free Software should be offended by this.
in short, good luck with the job thing, and take the necessary steps to avoid having the door striking any part of your body on your way out.
I had a feeliing it would get posted to slashdot.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess every dreg and their ugly mother will crawl out of the wood work to find fault with something I did now. Have fun wasting your key strokes.
But I felt I owed a 'what happened' to the people out there that loved LRP for all it really was: Compact, Efficient, Powerful, and most of all a Unique Operating System.
But just 3 hours after I finalized the last update?? Jeez...I guess people are just dying to find anything to submit. It's always interesting when your apache processes jump from 5 to 152...
Dave
Re:I had a feeliing it would get posted to slashdo (Score:4, Interesting)
It is true, the reason to start a "free collaborative work" or whatever you want to call it, is for fun. However, as time goes, it is easy for the project to become more important. By that I mean you have a lot of users and developers, and it seems to take more and more of your free time. You then conclude that the project is an important part of computing, and must be completed. That is, it has moved beyond the hobby phase. Folks are using your project in real businesses, users are using it for real uses. It would be a sad state of the human race if such a useful project were not to finish, and so before the green alien in the flying saucer has a chance to laugh at humanity, you fart in his general direction and press on. Your project is now more important than your real job. You contribute a valuable effort to society, and you're broke off your ass. WTF?
Folks will tell you that this is because you made a stupid decision of participating in a "free collaborative work". I don't think this is true. It's wonderful to begin a project to scratch an itch, and in the beginning you weren't hurting for cash, so it's all good. Fine, they will then tell you that you made a stupid decision to continue the project, to waste all of your time on something when not enough is coming back to you in order to sustain it. Well, now you have given up on the project, so you will satisfy these critics. You are finally 'sane', now get a real job, right?
Wrong. At least I'd like to think so. Maybe it doesn't make economic sense, or maybe it doesn't fit with typical capitalist society, but this is what I see: I see a useful project dead. Certainly the project was useful for people, otherwise it wouldn't piss you off that no one is returning the favor. So now this project, which is surely useful, has been discontinued. Someone else could pick up the project and continue, sure, but would they be any more successful?
If you ask me, "that ain't right" (to quote Chris Rock from "Head of State"). In a better society, this useful project would be sustained somehow. I don't really have a solution for you. All I can say is that I understand your pain, and there are others out there that feel the same way, too. Unfortunately, the green alien is laughing.
Re:I had a feeliing it would get posted to slashdo (Score:5, Insightful)
You complain that you could find no one to contribute, "Untrue to the opensource dogma, actually finding people to contribute work to a project is a task in and of itself." And that you weren't even recognized for your work, "Acknowledgement and referral would have at least been acceptable."
In this, you have wronged the hard work of people that have contributed to, improved, maintained, and taken leadership of something you started. The failings you've claimed are a reflection of yourself, not the community. Whatever is going on, you need to be significantly more honest with not only the community, but significantly more honest with yourself.
Re:I had a feeliing it would get posted to slashdo (Score:5, Informative)
I am a project member of LEAF and feel somewhat compelled to reply to your comments if you feel inclined to take the time to read them.
LEAF and the literly dozens of other off shoots used the LRP os as their base and then added enhancements mostly via the way of application specific extenstions. I've yet to see any major revamping of the OS itself by anyone else...only upgrades to newer componets. (kernel, busybox, etc...)
While this is true to some extent, much work has gone on beyond your base as well as Matthew Grant's work. Many of us made use of the LRP site's resources though you rarely (if ever) showed any indication of using any of our work or including any other developers in your personal work (which was "LRP" itself). There is little to
none of your code in David Douthitt's "Oxygen" project that has been reworked to necessitate only the kernel patches. The kernel patches do not work with a 2.4.x kernel and any variants using these newer kernels have written their own patches.
My discontent with all of them is LRP had a modular packaging system, and instead of re-releasing the the whole works with a specialized purpose, they could have released *packages*! This would have greatly help the progress of LRP itself.
True to an extent, this package format is little more than a
You will notice there is no 'LEAF OS'. There are like 5 sub-versions on a LEAF site based on the original LRP OS.
Which is the foundation of the LEAF project (found in the FAQ section). Rather LEAF is a project that promotes somewhat similar variants or OS's under an unbrella that encourages every release to do their own thing w/o needing to be constrined to approval by a single person such as LRP was. Many of our variants do still use a some of your base, but this is at a dead-end as far to the degree we could extend it and we are moving on as future development demands and this comment will not be true in any degree with near future releases.
For the most part they did the equivelent of re-releasing Debian instead of creating a '.deb'. Saying LEAF or any of the other direivatives continued the work of LRP is like saying, Tivo continued the work of Redhat. Their goals were very specific, LEAF in particular, to maintain a firewall on a floppy. LRP, name aside (it WAS to be renamed), had the goal of becoming a next generation, general purpose OS, with a highly refined and embedalbe micro core.
I think you will find this already done with Oxygen. It is fair and necessary to state that much of the work that LEAF started from was due to LRP, of which we thank-you for, but life goes on for all of us. There may have been more contributions to the LRP codebase, but you made that virtually impossible when you force your political views on others, especially when it can be construed that we share the same opinion w/o any warning or approval. You have personally nailed the coffin in any future development of LRP and ended what code contributions you 'could' have received due to your ego and disregard for the feelings/opinions of others. I'm sure this has also played out in your empoyablitiy as well, but that is a question that can not be answered by anyone outside of yourself and your past employers.
Nobody in LEAF is selling our code releases or making a living from it. I've personally been employed without work for 6 months myself, but I have no one to blame but myself for this. I have always found your abilities and code to be noteworthy, but this does not mandate that you would be able to make a living from what you give away. You have not made any available updates in around 3 years and I personally find it sad that you have reduced yourself to begging rather than make your useful place in society as most of us have been able to.... if for nothing else, but simply for the necessity of feeding our families.
Sincerely,
Lynn Avants
Re:I had a feeliing it would get posted to slashdo (Score:4, Insightful)
LRP is useful, and made a huge contribution to bringing Linux to the embedded world. Had it not been for LRP, it is possible that MS would have hooks in far more software than it does, via CE, and Linux wouldn't be making nearly as many waves as it does in business publications.
However, you cannot let something like this turn into something that consumes all your time and energy. It cannot be more than a hobby, unless you have some way ahead of time to convert it into money.
My guess is that you spent a lot of time working on this, and expected to be able to "cash in" the fame at some point to get a decent job (with Caldera or whomever). Not unreasonable, and a lot of GPL folks feel the same way. But it's a bad market for tech folks right now (or at least less good than it was), and it didn't turn out that way. Even Linus, who has a tremendous amount of fame stored up, worked for years for Transmeta and on other things before actually becoming bankrolled by a company.
You can *always* get a job. It may not be a great job. It may pay $30k. It may be working at a Babbages. If you have technical skills, you can at least put food on the table. You may be better off lowering your standards, getting a job that doesn't pay too much (and thus eating and having something to do all day), waiting out the recession, and then run out and look for a better job. There are a lot of folks that can't find a decent job now. That's just part of tech life right now.
Thank you for your code.
Finally, you should take the people poking on you here only semi-seriously. Slashdotters love actually being able to affect something by typing, regardless of the actual impact. If it's to piss some guy off who is already pretty upset, then they'll do it.
P.S. From a technical standpont, I agree with a few other people -- I think your final set of ideas may be too ambitious to do well. It takes a tremendous amount of work to write a good interpreter and good language, and the same goes for an OS and support utilities. I'd hold off on that, since it's such a huge project. It may be good if you're willing to wait until retirement or something like that, but in the meantime, it's a tremendous undertaking.
Re:I had a feeliing it would get posted to slashdo (Score:4, Insightful)
I read your rant, and you're complaining about people not sending you money.
OK, you claim to have received about $100,000 for the LRP over 6 years.
How much of that have you sent to the kernel, GCC, and BusyBox authors and contributors?
Seems like you're bitching about people "making money off your hard work", while you're guilty of doing exactly the same thing.
David's Real Problem (Score:5, Informative)
For those of you who are interested, the meat of the LRP project lives on in LEAF [sourceforge.net]. I suggest anybody that feels sorry for David and his "take my toys and leave" speech should take a LONG look at the LEAF project and what it offers and the amount of people involved with it. You'll see the real reason for David packing up and going home.
Hats off to everybody involved in LEAF, keep up the good work.
WTF?!?! FFS!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
He EXPECTED something for his work!
If your going to start up something in GPL and release it.. don't EXPECT anything more than a "Hey thats cool" e-mail in return..
If by some chance a company decides to hire you cause its a good product then GREAT, but don't winge because father christmas forgot you.. jeez
having said that.. its sad to see it go.. but meh.. what am I going to do about it..?
Nothing... I used it for two days then dumped it for a better product..
Them's the breaks..
This sucks... (Score:5, Informative)
1. No open source project is ever truly dead. I don't think I have to explain why this is, but this is one of the best parts of free software.
2. The author of the project is completely justified in feeling bitter that he's having a hard time putting food on the table. However, this is not (and he does point this out) totally the fault of open source. Honestly, in today's post-dot-com market, do you ever think he could have gotten anywhere had he built this project from the ground up as a proprietary system? All by himself? With a few employees, maybe?
No, something's wrong here, and it ain't Linux. (Randroids beware, vicious attacks on the market coming...)
The fact of the matter is that the market is a horrible, horrible place for brilliantly useful ideas to thrive if they aren't (tadaaaaa!) marketable... If they can't turn enough of a profit to not only feed you, your employees, your landlord (if you're brick and mortar), and your shareholders, then it's not gonna play.
COUNTER-ATTACK: No, this does not mean that I feel that State direction would be a better means of producing things. The market may suck, but the government gives new meaning to the term 'fucked up piece of shit.'
We're gonna have to figure things out quick, because situations like this are going to become more and more prevalant. The first part of figuring things out is admitting that the dot-con boom helped out open source tremendously. First off, a lot of excess money floatin' around means it's easy to grab a bit of the overflow. Second, ridiculously high paying jobs that are easy to come by means that we can easily work on open source projects on the side. And third, due to the omnipresence of incredibly stupid middle managers who don't know the difference between TCSH, BASH, AND M*A*S*H, means we can work on this stuff while on the company clock, and nobody's the wiser.
But that sweet deal is gone, boys and girls, and it's probably never coming back. Because open source is invincible (meaning it can't be killed, not that it can't be hurt) means that it survived the fallout a lot better that many proprietary systems. But that doesn't mean it's gonna become a whole lot harder to develop.
However, the catch-22 is that, as the economy gets shittier, the more people need cheap software.
So how do give the people (and ourselves) what they want, while at the same time, having enough money to eat and pay rent? (*)
I never said I had the answers, though. But it'll be interesting to see what comes out of it all.
Dominion
Anarchist FAQ [blackened.net]
* NOTE: Money to eat and pay rent does not imply that _any_ of us deserve to eat at five star restaurants and live in $1800/mo studio apartments. Let's get off our high horses. We lucked out for a few years in the 90's, but it's ridiculous to assume that we could be a part of that club for very long. And it doesn't really matter, anywhere with cheap rent and good burritos is gonna be infinitely more interesting than any yuppie enclave where the street musicians have been put in jail and everybody goes to sleep at 9:00pm.
There is an answer that seriously works. (Score:4, Interesting)
(1) start writing magazine articles, all along as you go. Get those magazine articles published in a journal [that's pay right there.]
(2) All along, as you produce magazine articles, make sure your magazine articles give away real secrets, but not the most valuable ones -- just hint at where the answers are for those. That's your advertising. When companies call with questions, CONSULT. [More money].
(3) Not all your eggs go in one basket. Teaching at a community college can be very helpful. [More Money!] Watch where the market takes you, and work first on the stuff that pays. [That's where the money is].
(4) Live cheap, not expensively. Don't get an expensive studio -- use a shed. Every dollar saved is like $2 or more, earned, when you count taxes, expenses, and whatnot. [Like more money]. Also, no SB loans! [Unless you want to work for the bank, and wind up homeless].
(5) When you have enough magazine articles, rework slightly to make uniform and publish in book format. More money.
That's all I remember offhand right now, but that's the gist of the book. My experience is that insofar as I follow that formula, it's a pretty good formula. I'm not able to follow it 100%, but you won't be able to either. This is just a general roadmap.
Or, to sum it all up (Score:5, Funny)
The Linux Router Project is no more.
It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This project is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, It's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-PROJECT!!
Not quite the whole story (Score:5, Informative)
In fact what happened was that the LRP project leader fell out with just about all the other developers working on it due to political views he expressed on the LRP website.
Most of the other developers found his views pretty outrageous so went and formed the LEAF project [sourceforge.net] The original developer carried on more or less alone with LRP.
So to all intents and purposes, what was once LRP is still alive and well in the form of LEAF.
One Floppy NetBSD? (Score:3, Informative)
"fdgw" is one floppy version of NetBSD/i386. [1] It can run on old machine without HDD
For example, old pc (e.g. IBM PC110) becomes:
pretty ADSL router
pretty router
natbox
your home psuedo firewall
This system also supports DHCP and syslog.
This is similar to router product, off course. The extension is easier and better than router product.
Since the floppy size is very limited, we cannot build all-in-one box. So, "fdgw" provides several models for several purposes. Each model has different built-in applications and kernel configurations. For example, simplest model, "natbox" model supports IPv6 but ADSL router model not support v6 since ADSL router needs more programs, such as pppd and rp-pppoe, than natbox model.
Debian Router Poject is ALIVE... (Score:4, Informative)
I moved on to base all my work round an HD based system as this meant that I could concentrate on thenetworkign and routing software.
Unlike Dave Cinege, I am still using Debian Route Project in my job. You can find it up at http://debian-router.anathoth.gen.nz/
It is still alive and kicking, and I have just submitted the iptables
The stuff on my site would be a good match for Trusted Debian as well.
Enjoy!!
Money VS Fun (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to have fun, find something you want to do, and do it.
Pretty hard, eh?
It's not uncommon for me to GPL a "commodity" section of my codebase. (I prefer LGPL) and much of my codebase is similarly licensed. Others come along, use my stuff, and improve on it, and I get a free ride on their improvements.
However, there's plenty of my stuff that nobody's gonna see without signing an NDA first.
Busines != Pleasure. Get used to it.
Use your open source stuff on your resume. I've donated alot towards the documentation of PHP-GTK. It's on my list of credentials, all right, even though I didn't do it for money.
But for god's sake, if you give something away, forget about charging for it!!!
-Ben
Programmers vs GPL (Score:4, Insightful)
I have looked at pro's and con's of different licensing for my own programs and here's my conclusion. If you are a programmer (eg, you are/will make your living on coding) don't release your program under the GPL or any open source software when you first release it. Why?
1) Because you aren't going to get that much code contribution anyways. The majority of your contribution will come in the form of bug reports whether your program is closed or open sourced.
2) Your time is worth something, the GPL essentially says it is worth zero. The GPL is great for hobby programmers, it's like gardening. You give your produce to friends and get bragging rights.
3) Employer don't care whether the software on your resume is open source or not as long as you wrote it.
3) If you want a way for people to contribute code, code in modules instead, and/or release an open sourced plugin SDK instead. Keep control of the core code. Dual licensing does not do this.
So when should you release it as an OSS? I believe when the project is worth zero. Because then it won't hurt you (emotionally or financially) to release it for free under the GPL.
At the risk of being in bad taste... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it really all that bad? Fitting your OS onto a floppy disk no longer seems terribly important to me. A year or so ago, I built a complete, self-compiling LFS system that would fit onto a 64 meg flash drive. That's a *complete* system, including C libraries, compiler, LVS load-balancer, etc.. With hardware getting faster, larger, and cheaper, being able to fit things on a floppy doesn't seem quite as important.
steve
Could be worse ... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/business
It made me decide to close my Bank of """America""" account
The Irony...
Bank of America send 1,000 jobs to India
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
The GNU Ponzi scheme (Score:4, Insightful)
Although I agree that open source software is better, and I enjoy using and working on it, are we all just enabling large corporations to make loads of dough off our work while we starve in relitive obscurity? Are we acting in our own self interest when we basically work for free and allow anyone to use the fruits of our labor?
I wonder if this is the end of programming as a career that you can live off of. Garbage men don't go pick up garbage for fun in their spare time, the problem is programmers enjoy what they do and don't think of the economic consequences of doing so.
Someone please explain how programmers will make a wage they can live off of in the future. I've heard a lot of pie in the sky types of explanations (as I did about the Internet). Sure I believe that companies can make money off of open source, by selling supported and packaged "solutions" but that doesn't mean they need to pay the people who created the software they sell.
I think its time for us to start working in each other's interest. It seems that programmers are the new exploited class, and perhaps it is time to organize for better labor conditions and stop screwing ourselves over.
I like open source, but sometimes I secretly hope for it to fail. Otherwise, I fear, I will be working at MacDonalds, coming home to do my real work for free.
a few thousand dollars... (Score:5, Funny)
For Christ's sake, what do those programmers eat?? With a few thousand Dollars, I can eat for a year or longer...
Could have happened on any OS (Score:4, Insightful)
Projects die and people burn out on all platforms.
It's bitter when it happens to you, but it's part of the game.
80% of small businesses fold without the first two years. It's even higher in IT. I suspect the numbers are similar for projects inside big companies, though the failure can be covered up. Even within Microsoft, over 50% of projects are reported to be cancelled before release, and many people burn out after a few years. It might not make Slashdot headlines but dig around enough in people's blogs and you'll find all the same depression and disillusionment and sorrow.
Hell, it could have been even worse if it was a commercial/closed source project. The guy might have lost a lot of money, rather than just feeling he wasted his time.
The one good thing about open source is that when a project shuts down, it doesn't have to die. Other people can restart it or fork it perhaps some time later. I think this is some consolation.
linksys (Score:4, Insightful)
little boxes were/are cheap and flexible. (Well
semi flexible - not much compared to a Linux box.)
The Original Developer Killed LRP (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the information and development was on the unofficial c0wz website (those involved with LRP know which site I'm talking about). But that site went down around the time LEAF started. Every once in a while I run accross an old mirror of the c0wz website, which still has the best collection of networking links and information IMHO.
One thing people don't realize is that if they don't have the time or energy for a project, they need to hand it off to someone else. Otherwise everyone will jump ship and start a new project (see LEAF) and leave the original developer with nothing more than a dead project and a few memories. When something a popular as LRP dies, it's not because of a lack of interest from the community, it's because of a lack of interest, direction, and leadership from the original developer. The LRP would continue on if the original developer would learn to just let go...
LRP does not pay off anymore (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that is not the case anymore. Our new T1 here uses a $500 netopia router that took just a few hours to get setup properly (this was mostly due to poor implementation support, we were promised the telco would configure the router and we would only have to plug it in). Even with the trouble we had I would not hesitate to use that kind of router again, instead of trying to build one from scratch with something like LRP.
For the love of open source (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to point it out, but his personal domain is 'psychosis.com'.
I don't feel THAT sorry for him... (Score:4, Insightful)
You should build GPL stuff either to scratch your own itch or for the pure fun of it. You release it as GPL in the hope that others will improve your work and in THAT way you get something back.
Sure, would be nice if companies gave more back. On the other hand, if Redhat gave out jobs to everybody who wrote something included in their distribution, they would have hundreds of thousands on the payroll.
There are tons of things I'd like to write and get paid to give it away. If I want to do that, I'll have to find a company who'll do it.
Also looks like this guy bit off more than he could chew. A new shell? To do right, that's a tough job. A new packaging system? It's hard for one guy to change the world. Linus was lucky. Not everyone will be.
I guess this happens all the time. Its a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are doing this type of thing with the expectation of making a living then you are running a business. If you are running a business then you had better take care of business. This means taking care of a bunch of things that geeks donâ(TM)t like to have to worry about.
It is tough. I'm a geek and I love what I do but I am always juggling my dreams and intellectual interests with the demands of life. My wife and I aren't super materialistic but we have a fairly nice house, like to drive reliable cars, etc. It all takes money. Not a lot but enough that it doesnâ(TM)t just happen by accident.
There are a lot of intellectually challenging things that I would love to do but I can't figure out how to make it work financially. In a lot of ways I respect his ability to forego financial gratification and pursue his dreams but I do think it is foolish to pour time into a project without some sort of plan for taking care of you. If you arenâ(TM)t attending to your business nobody else is going to.
He should have at least had some sort of business plan or plans that would result in him meeting his other life goals in addition to his intellectual pursuits. Thatâ(TM)s just the way life is whether you think it is a good thing or not. Pretty much everyone else on the planet is doing the same thing.
Free software isnâ(TM)t really free. It takes people who have invested a lot of time and money in their education, computers, electricity, a roof over your head. This all adds up.
So, I guess this sort of thing happens all the time. Geek enjoys programming and computers wants to leave his/her mark on the world. Works on project at the neglect of other things, then gets pissed off because the other things werenâ(TM)t taken care of.
The importance of taking care of business (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest mistake I made when I became a consultant was to not learn about business before I took the plunge, and to not adequately take care of my business once I committed to it.
I became a consultant because I was a good programmer, wanted to be my own boss and wanted to work out of my home, not because I had any love of or aptitude for business. The importance of taking care of business has been a hard lesson to learn.
There is bookkeeping, accounting (two related but different things), tax filing, sales, marketing, contract negotations, billing, and, uh "encouraging" the client to actually pay, collections when that doesn't work, and time management.
None of these come naturally to most geeks, not even when you're a skilled and talented programmer.
I guess this Dave guy just tossed an Open Source project out into the wild and expected the checks to start appearing in his mailbox. Even under the best circumstances, it's much more complicated than that.
I started my consulting business full-time on April 1, 1998. I'm only just beginning to get a handle on the business issues.
The guy makes a good point... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand there is a definite trend developing where people who are able to write software are much more cautious about giving it away. And I actually think that's healthy, because contrary to what some may be delusional about, existence of free software is not a fact of nature, it is a result of someone's hard work and generosity.
And don't buy this bull that writing free software pays in fame or whatever. I have little respect for people who say things like this.
Embedded linux history and forking (Score:4, Informative)
LRP was floppy firewall distro, that did not need a harddrive. It needed only 386 PC or better, 2 Nics, floppy drive, and sometimes a keyboard and monitor. It did not do fancy things, just NAT routing, firewalling and DHCP. But you could add
But LRP failed to inivate fast enough, (e.g. I lobbied for a bootable CDs, to no avail) or document well enough, so Linux Embedded Application Firewall [LEAF] forked off. LEAF got space on SourceForge and spawned flavors, such as Oxygen, Dachstein, Eiger, Bering and others quickly helped fill out the space, improving core technologies and documentation. LEAF added bootable CDs and tons of packages. But LEAF struggled with picking a GlibC version and development of extensions became some what Balkanized.
The size limitation of the floppy made 2.4 kernal and iptables unatainable. Chuck Stienkhuler removed this boundry with his LRP-CD, which could fit every major linux ethernet driver, and so much more.
When I saw that, I thought, "well why not a full distro on a bootable CD", and was pleasently surprised by finding Knoppix. I even was the first person to mentioned it on Slashdot [slashdot.org]. [search Knoppix in stories on slashdot and find the first entry
LRP also spawned the CoyoteLinux firewall, which added a Win32 floppy build exe and a linux floppy build bash script. It makes building a floppy firewall really easy.
Death of LRP is not a surprise with LEAF on the scene. There is much life in the "embedded" linux space beyond firewalls. LRP got thing moving and many other GPL projects have adopted the core ideas and kept up the rate of acceleration. Bootable CD distros are exploding, into Mesh Networks, MAME systems, Linux on X-box hacks, PVR systems, LAN MP3 Servers, print server, LAN DNScache/DHCP/NTP server, Honey Pots and on and on. We will se more and more bootable CD distros, that will make our lives easier, and take the strain out of admin and system upgrade. Oh look, a new ISO on line, I down load and reboot my system. If it does not work, I pop the old CD-R back in. No muss, no fuss.
LRP is dead, long live LEAF and Knoppix, and
-Nathaniel
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux wanna be.
Re:Any publicity == good publicity? (Score:3, Funny)
I think we burned a hole in his floppy disk from 9 million drive seeks in 1 second.
You don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
A single floppy distro for network appliances is actually a great idea. Write protect the floppy, run with no hard disk. This way even if it does get cracked, all you have to do is cycle the power - there is no way for it to get 'infected' with anything.
I don't think it matters so much whether it's based on *BSD or Linux or runs ipf or iptables, or which you or I prefer. Those are minor points. The main thing is that by limiting it's size and making sure that it can run entirely in memory with no writable storage attached, you have an enourmous security benefit. Not only can't it be infected, it's also a lot easier to audit, it doesn't have space for all sorts of cruft like any of these systems leave on your HD after a typical install - just the essentials.
Floppies are unreliable? Sure they are. So what. You keep a disk image on your workstation and make a new one whenever need be. When the floppy goes bad you'll notice the next time you boot, and replace it. Big deal.
Re:You don't get it. (Score:4, Interesting)
I heard of one company that had a Web server with a CD-RW and a CD-ROM drive. The site content was on a CD, and they moved it to the CD-RW drive when they needed to update it, then moved it back to the CD-ROM drive for normal operation. I always thought that was a great idea (provided you have easy physical access to your servers).
What's that smell from under that bridge? (Score:4, Funny)
No, I'm not giving you my money.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Context (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people would speak differently to their friends about problems at home than they would to USA Today.
He ended the project. People coming to his website may want to know why. He's telling them. It's a single page of text. That seems pretty reasonable to me, since we've all seen worse. The guy didn't mean to impose on you.
I can't begin to count the number of people who write nasty "why's he making such a big deal about this" posts in response to some poor person who put something up on a webpage that gets ten thousand hits a month which attracted the interest of slashdot. It's like being angry that your neighbour is saying boring things to his wife on their patio again.
Re:Should have released it BSD. (Score:5, Insightful)
That way, other people could still get the code, but at least he could re-incorporate all of the changes to date into a new propreitry system, and start charging for it. Whether people would buy it or not is a different story, but if he made changes people really wanted and they weren't in the free BSD-licensed version, he would at least have a shot of making money from it without depending entirely on donations. (AND there would still be a free version). Of course, this is Slashdot. People here are convinced the GPL is better for some reason.
Maybe some people like the GPL because, say, they understand it, unlike you?
Any code he wrote himself and which was his own code he can re-release under any licence he wants, even if he already released it GPL. The GPL does not stop you from releasing your own code under any other licence; it can't. It can stop you from releasing code incorporating somebody else's GPLed code, but then again that's the point-- to protect the original author from having their code used in a way they don't want.
It's disinformation to suggest that if somebody releases their own code as GPL, they can't later release it as something else. It's poor thinking to then take that incorrect assertion and use it as a basis for attacking the GPL.
-Rob