Retiring from uClibc development

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Sun Apr 2 01:02:46 UTC 2006


On Saturday 01 April 2006 3:40 pm, Manuel Novoa III wrote:
> Rob,
>
> On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 02:41:42PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> > 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? :)
>
> Hasn't come up.  But we've both been pretty busy.

I think you'd be interested.  Check busybox.net, our most recent news entry.  
We have pro-bono attack lawyers to churn through the "hall of shame" backlog, 
and more.  It's really cool.

> > > > 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
>
> My condolences for your pain.

And my condolences on yours.

"Life is what happens while you're making other plans" - John Lennon.

> > projects I contributed to to care about any of this, and thus I wasn't
> > disappointed.
>
> Perhaps I was more idealistic than you.

Sturgeon's law applies to people, too.

> > 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 do a lot of development at home as well.  Just ask my wife.

I'm in a coffee shop banging on busybox right now. :)

> > 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.
>
> Before Toni died, I never even asked for a simple thank you.  And I don't
> think requesting charitable donations to a worthy cause from those
> benefiting from my work counts as my being "paid back".  I don't think of a
> community as a group that does something out of some type of obligation. 
> What I _do_ think of as a community is a group that is mutally supportive. 
> That's what I thought I was part of.  That turned out not to be the case,
> and that's a sad commentary on the state of society today.

Most people don't have a clue how to relate to somebody else's tragedy.  If 
it's really unpleasant, they'd rather not think about it.

> > 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
>
> WHOA!  Back up.  I'm not trying to discourge psm from working at all.
> What I would like to see happen is for him to start working in a manner
> that doesn't hinder other developers.

It sounds like we need clearer guidelines and better tools.

All the patches I've done to uClibc have been against the last -stable 
release, and generally way out of date and inappropriate for submission 
anyway.  I want to contribute more to uClibc, but I have a backlog of almost 
a dozen major projects for busybox, a couple smaller ones for the kernel, my 
firmware build, a couple pokes at qemu...

I'm trying to get a build environment so that I can run uClibc under each 
platform that qemu supports.  So far, I have yet to get this to come close to 
working.  If I do, believe me, I'll document it. :)

> All my fixes will eventually be 
> made available as required.  But since psm was treating tip as his own
> branch, there's a level of instability that makes it impossible for me
> to work with.  You don't see kernel development taking place in that
> fashion, do you?  No... because groups of people simply can not work
> efficiently together in that fashion.

Sure.  That's why they have git, and why they stage things through 
lieutenants.  One problem I have with svn is that you can't branch and then 
easily marshall code back and forth between branches.

That said, I couldn't use 2.5 for months, and the new "continuous development" 
model in 2.6 only works because they have better tools (ala git and ketchup 
and so on) and because they release every 3 months so you can reasonably base 
development on the last -stable without an insane level of pain trying to 
merge it later.

> > 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
>
> Indeed.  One of my goals was to have I18N support that could be used
> on cheaper, more resource-constrained devices in various parts of the
> world.  But as I said, if I do resume work on it, I'd make it GPL to
> try to maximize the value of that contribution.

*shrug*.  There's a strong argument that a GPL library that implements a 
documented API isn't much different from the LGPL because the API acts as a 
copyright barrier to derived work status.  What releasing it GPL means is 
there's a lot of uncertainty, and it can't be merged cleanly.

> > 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.
>
> Don't put words in my mouth.  I _never_ said that people should stop
> volunteering.  I still do.  I just pick my causes more carefully so as
> to protect myself and to avoid being taken advantage.

Your time is yours to do with as you please.  My concern stemmed from reading 
people stomping on a volunteer and justifying doing so by bringing up their 
own commercial concerns.  Admittedly, I was predisposed to think this of 
sjhill due to things he said on IRC (3:53 and 4:16 from here come to mind):

http://ibot.rikers.org/%23uclibc/20060325.html.gz

Having been a consulted myself I understand the temptation to behave this way.  
No matter how well you're doing now, the end of contract looms.  I always had 
the luxury having proven repeatedly to myself that I can live reasonably 
comfortably on about $22k a year (before taxes) by cutting little frivolities 
like car insurance, new glasses more often than once every three years...  
(It helps that I _like_ peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, macaroni and 
cheese, the dollar menu items at Wendy's and McDonald's.)

I'm not suggesting anybody else should live like that, and it's certainly not 
a prerequisite for contributing to open source projects.

Anyway: valid technical concerns, yay.  Process management concerns, yay.  How 
_should_ someone like psm go about contributing to busybox?  Ideally, the 
project maintainer stages the merges, or appoints lieutenants to do so.  In 
theory, yelling at psm if he's doing wrong is Erik's job...

> > 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.
>
> My thanks.

I promised I would.  I need to be poked about this sort of thing to remember.

> Manuel

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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