«

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 18:28:59 +1200, thing <> spoke
these fine words:

>> A bitter old man,
>
>Sounds like you woger
>
>realising too late that his life's work has amounted
>> to very little
>
>oh yet again woger strikes....
>
>> A sad tale, that I'm sure others could learn from. (Although, of
>> course, most Linux users do not contribute, they just take a free ride
>> on the works of others, like this fellow).
>>
>
>Woger you are a prat as usual. Admit it you are too stupid to use OSS.

I am not Woger. Note that I can actually string two sentences
together, and know how to use punctuation .

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:49:47 +1200, shannon <> spoke
these fine words:

>H.O.G wrote:
>
><Wintroll *******s snipped>

So expressing an opinion that differs from yours is trolling?

I stand by my comments, and re-state that this was NOT a troll
attempt.

I have copied my original comments here again, and have added
additional comments below. Care to discuss, or are you just going to
name call?

> Just one example of someone coming to realise that producing stuff for
> free doesn't put food on the table, and will be taken advantage of by
> many others.

What part of this do you think is trolling? How can give something
away put food on the table? Therefore, there are very few professional
developers for Linux. All other developers are taken advantage of.
Fact.

> A bitter old man, realising too late that his life's work has amounted
> to very little because he gave it away for free, and consequently does
> not have a nest egg for his retirement.

Which part of this do you disagree with?

> I find it interesting that yet another fierce advocate of Open Source
> talks about hoping that "someone with 6 figure$ to burn" would come
> and commercialise his product.

This kind of comment has been made many times by many people.

> A sad tale, that I'm sure others could learn from. (Although, of
> course, most Linux users do not contribute, they just take a free ride
> on the works of others, like this fellow).

I could see how this could be interpreted as a troll, but honestly,
what percentage of Linux users actually really contribute code? I
would guess about 0.0001 %, tops.

H.O.G wrote:
> Just one example of someone coming to realise that producing stuff for
> free doesn't put food on the table, and will be taken advantage of by
> many others.
>
> A bitter old man, realising too late that his life's work has amounted
> to very little because he gave it away for free, and consequently does
> not have a nest egg for his retirement.
>
> I find it interesting that yet another fierce advocate of Open Source
> talks about hoping that "someone with 6 figure$ to burn" would come
> and commercialise his product.
>
> A sad tale, that I'm sure others could learn from. (Although, of
> course, most Linux users do not contribute, they just take a free ride
> on the works of others, like this fellow).
>
>
> From http://linuxrouter.org/ :
>
> 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 ****ed 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
> ****. 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 on instead of continuing to wait on the tooth
> fairy to show up to help me persue my artistic dreams.
>
> Oh Well...
>
> My thanks go out to the few people that did help to make happen the
> LRP that was released. Untrue to the opensource dogma, actually
> finding people to contribute work to a project is a task in and of
> itself.
>
> My special thanks to Phil Hands and Paul Russell who helped make the
> early days possible. I would have never learned to hate Bourne shell
> at a guru's level without your help.
>
> Paul Wouters, modmaker did more to help LRP proliferate then
> anyone/thing else. I wish at the time I had realized it's true worth,
> and encouraged you more with it.
>
> Charles Wright, the only guy who ever really helped with any needed
> coding of the LRP base.
>
> Vesselin Atanasov, we made portslave into something quite nice.
>
> My eternal disregard also goes out to those that thought they had
> something to do with LRP but really did nothing for it but complain on
> the mailing list, and to those that did do something with LRP and
> never tried to collaborate with me to further the project.
>

OSS makes my life easier at work, Windows makes my life easier at home
(yes Ive run Linux as a desktop operating system at home before). I
think one thing that is important to note about this link is that it is
from 2002, which was quite a low point for I.T. (things are a bit better
now but have never really returned to 2000 peak levels). Companies like
Caldera that he mentioned may not have really been in a strong position
to invest in extra resource (such as hiring him) and I certainly don't
think many companies then would have been considering investing in this.

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 16:38:00 +1200, H.O.G wrote:

>
> Just one example of someone coming to realise that producing stuff for
> free doesn't put food on the table, and will be taken advantage of by
> many others.

<snip>

You have missed the fundamental point. Open source is a development
model, and not a business model. Some people have managed to turn this
development model into revenue by employing a successful business model -
eg. IBM attributes billions of $ of its revenue to linux. Likewise, some
people have failed to turn this development model into a
successful business model. However, this says nothing about open source.
Open source has never claimed to be a business model, and has never tried
to be a business model. It is only people whose heads are firmly stuck in
the "software must derive monopoly rents to be successful" mindset who
can't get their heads round it. Open source as a development model is
succeeding despite these people.

Oh, and btw, I'm a coder, and someone who contributes to the community and
makes money off open-source.

Matt

> I could see how this could be interpreted as a troll, but honestly,
> what percentage of Linux users actually really contribute code? I
> would guess about 0.0001 %, tops.

And who makes the money? IBM and Red Hat while all the rest are along for a
free ride.

This is where the OSS movement risks coming unstuck.

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 19:37:36 +1200, H.O.G wrote:

> On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:49:47 +1200, shannon <> spoke
> these fine words:
>
>>H.O.G wrote:
>>
>><Wintroll *******s snipped>
>
> So expressing an opinion that differs from yours is trolling?
>
> snip
>
> What part of this do you think is trolling? How can give something
> away put food on the table? Therefore, there are very few professional
> developers for Linux. All other developers are taken advantage of.
> Fact.
>
>

They are fairly smart guys who advocate this linux , but they also have
created this fantasy world.

Where one successsful project which blinds them to the other 95% of stalled
/ abandoned projects that were doomed from the start ....

Doomed due to $$$ needed for R & D / costs of creating documentation / god
forbid actually pay the developers for their work.


Its a tough world in the CSS sector ... and what got OSS to where it is
today also strangles the crap out of it.

Out ...

In article <>,
H.O.G <> wrote:

>Just one example of someone coming to realise that producing stuff for
>free doesn't put food on the table, and will be taken advantage of by
>many others.
>
>From http://linuxrouter.org/ :
>
>News:
>2003-06-22
>LRP == R.I.P. (1997-2002)

News travels fast on the Internet, doesn't it...

In article <d9jabv$geg$>, "Mercury" <>
wrote:

>> I could see how this could be interpreted as a troll, but honestly,
>> what percentage of Linux users actually really contribute code? I
>> would guess about 0.0001 %, tops.
>
>And who makes the money? IBM and Red Hat while all the rest are along for a
>free ride.

Do you have any idea how many open-source projects there are out there?
Thousands. Literally. Do you really think IBM and Red Hat are
contributing to all, or even most of them?

Not a chance. It's simply not possible for a handful of large companies
to dominate the open-source world the way they can the closed-source
world. In closed-source, you can raise the barriers to the entry of new
competitors; in open-source, you can't.

H.O.G wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:49:47 +1200, shannon <> spoke
> these fine words:
>
>
>>H.O.G wrote:
>>
>><Wintroll *******s snipped>
>
>
> So expressing an opinion that differs from yours is trolling?
>
> I stand by my comments, and re-state that this was NOT a troll
> attempt.
>

The whole lot is *******s, and if you weren't trolling you could easily
have ascertained the facts. You just cut and pasted a three year old
piece of shoddy rhetoric. They weren't even your comments. Thats just lazy.

The LRP router was built from the GPL licensed work of others, including
the linux kernel, which the developer is entitled to do.
That means he doesn't have an exclusive right to the results.
This guy canned his version because the project had forked to more
advanced versions.

If you have a look at the Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall project, you
will see what other branches of the project became.
A great deal of the credit is due to a guy in Christchurch who built the
Matterhorn branch, which in turn became Eiger then Dachstein, I have
used several of them since LRP. The current Bering branch is excellent,
and was used by Citylink in Wellington very successfully for their
embedded routers distributing from their fiber. They run a version on
Soekris, there are many versions that work with wifi etc, boot off usb,
cf memory, etc, way beyond the original LRP 2.0 kernel floppy router.

Shane wrote:
>>LOL
>>LRP was a one floppy router derived from Debian binaries with kernel 2.0
>>The rest of the developers said goodbye to this guy and got on with LEAF
>>http://leaf.sourceforge.net/
>>A good example of how open source code continues to be useful despite
>>the departure of participants
>
>
> I never knew that
> I liked LRP as an alternative to coyote (two floppys) and freesco (which
> I didnt like purely because everyone else used it
>

LEAF is a great modular mini distribution, capable of all sorts of other
useful tasks, besides firewalling and routing.