Retiring from uClibc development
Rob Landley
rob at landley.net
Sat Apr 1 19:41:42 UTC 2006
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.
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