Retiring from uClibc development

[Rob Landley]

On Thursday 30 March 2006 11:54 pm, Manuel Novoa III wrote:
> You seem to be confused about what I mean by competitor.  In particular,
> I'm referring to my employer's main business competitor that I know
> uses uClibc in some products but has not (to my knowledge) made source
> available for download.

Has Erik put you in touch with the SFLC yet? :)

> > PS. I'm not doing much myself to directly contribute to uclibc. I test
> > and report bugs to people who have enough knowledge to fix or submit
> > proper bugrports upstream. I do what I can. I dont have to clean up after
> > others while having a contractor on my neck, so those things are easy for
> > me to say.
>
> So you end your post with a disclaimer that all this is completely
> abstract to you and you have no real experience with the issues being
> discussed in this thread.  Next time that happens, you might want to
> consider other options than posting.

It's not abstract to me.

I've been paid to do software development for over 10 years.  In that time a 
friend of mine was raped and murdered (which sucked), my mother died of 
cancer (which sucked), I spent chunks as long as 8 months at a stretch 
completely unemployed (which sucked), I spent about a five year chunk not 
even dating (which sucked)...  I never expected anybody on any of the 
projects I contributed to to care about any of this, and thus I wasn't 
disappointed.

My current employer (Timesys) is the first company that's _ever_ let me do 
open source development on company time (which is highly cool), but even 
there the majority of what I'm supposed to work on is in-house stuff.  I'm 
still getting about 2/3 of my busybox development done evenings and weekends.

I've never contributed to any of these projects it because I expected to get 
paid for it, and I've never asked to be "paid back" for my volunteer efforts 
later.  I've gotten quite a bit of abuse, actually.  (I still need to get Al 
Viro to sign the big "go away, you are a worthless person" rant he emailed me 
back in 2001.  I want that sucker printed out on good quality paper, signed, 
and _framed_.)  I've certainly never treated the community as if it owes me 
anything.

I don't expect anybody else to work the way I do, because I know I'm strange.  
I'm grateful for the work that people contribute, for whatever reason.  Much 
of it's from sources whose motives I don't share, whose agendas I don't agree 
with, or who I don't personally like or at least have trouble working with.  
(The FSF, Joerg Schilling, the OpenBSD developers, Vodz...)

But every time I hear somebody trying to discourage a volunteer because their 
work makes life difficult for people trying to get paid for the same sort of 
work, I _automatically_ discount that argument.  I've heard it from a dozen 
sources.  And not just the Microsoft camp; the CEO of one of my previous 
employers told me he thought Linux was communist and he wished his customers 
would stop asking for it.  I was head of Linux Development for this company 
at the time, no the position didn't last long.  I didn't blame him for 
disagreeing with me, either.  (I thought he was wrong, but laying off 3/4 of 
the company so they could do what they wanted to do rather than what their 
customers wanted to do made them happy, and that's fine.)

I hope your internationalization work makes it into the tree someday.  You're 
a great programmer.  I hopes sjhill's threading work makes it into the tree 
someday.  If somebody doesn't want to do it anymore, I think it's sad but I 
understand.  If they can't afford to do it anymore (financially or 
emotionally), I also understand.

Saying that volunteering should stop being the basis for open source 
development, and that those who do are deluded or naieve?  I disagree.

P.S.  I was the person who offered to make a donation.  I don't remember if I 
actually did, since I didn't have a job at the time and $50 was about a 
week's food bill, and because I suck horribly at paperwork and mailing 
things.  I can certainly afford it now, though.  Check's on its way.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.