[SunRescue] Anyone need some computing time or shell?

[Joshua D. Boyd]

First, I prefer the term free software.  Check out fsf.org if you aren't
familiar with the difference.  Anyway, I'm not quite as idealistic as RMS,
but I have been known to not buy hardware because there were no free
(libre) drivers for linux or any other OS.  

Anyway, I am always annoyed at how hard it can be to get free software
working on non GNU/Linux machines.  Most projects are tightly tied to GCC,
which is OK when trying to port to Solaris, but not OK when I'm trying to
port to Irix where the GCC port is clearly inferior performance wise to
the MIPSpro compiler.  I've sent a few diffs away cleaning things up to
pass by MIPS compiler, but they have always been ignored with no
explaination.  I'm getting real sick of this, especially since I intend to
buy an SGI O2 this year, and would like to make it my primary machine.

On a slightly different note, I'm sick of all the OSS projects (like
Panora and GMAN) that talk about how they are going to be the best
renderer yet, and yet then never get past the simple ray-tracing stage.
If all I wanted was a good raytracer, I'd get better results out of
POVRay.  And person with the simplest programming skills should be able to
write a raytracer if they wanted too.

Anyway, I am not working on anything that needs a faster solaris machine
than I have access too without also requiring a fast display.

--
Joshua Boyd

On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Reagen Ward wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 08:02:49PM -0500, David Rouse wrote:
> 
> > You might want to pick your favorite Open Source project, maybe one where
> > the Solaris port is a little behind, and let someone have a little compiler
> > time. I know the netatalk folks have been looking for hardware.
> 
> I wish I had known the netatalk project was in need, as I use it
> regularly.  Any idea what they're lacking?  I sure owe them.
> 
> Here's a short rant concerning offering resources to OSS projects:
> 
> I used to run a small lab of machines with quite a selection of
> platforms, just so that opensource and poor developers would actually
> make their software portable and not Linux-only.  After two years, only
> two software projects (XShipWars and Carcosa) ever used my machines for
> anything, so I transfered ownership of the machines to SingleHelix, a
> company I'm involved with.  I got tired of doing the port work myself
> and sending diffs that were completely ignored, as the developers didn't
> 'have ready access to machines to test the diffs,' and weren't
> interested in remotely accessing machines to do the testing.  Gphoto is
> an excellent example; for a long time it was simply too glibc-dependent,
> but the developers cared not one whit.  The mailing list always had
> requests for Solaris support, and I actually got it working under 2.6
> and submitted my diffs.  I got a polite note explaining that they
> weren't interested in supporting Solaris, but thanks anyway.  As with
> many OSS projects, I got the feeling that theme support was more
> important.  I eventually found a nicer photo gallery tool and gave up on
> them. 
> 
> Actually, now that I think about it, almost all of the XShipWars
> port work was done by Matt Mensch (a Lab volunteer) and handed back to
> Learfox et al.  They had access and did log in on occasion, but I don't
> think they did much on their own; they were much too interested in
> having pico/pine, ncftp, and other tools installed.  Matt not only
> installed the tools for them, he fixed their code.
> 
> Overall, I'm amazed at the open source development community's utter
> lack of interest in producing portable code.  Granted, I never took 
> out an ad or posted it to slashdot, but I quietly offered system access
> and support services to about 250 projects that appeared to need such 
> access or claimed to be interested in portability but lacked access.  
> HP-UX (10.20 and 11), Solaris 2.5 - 2.7), Linux (all sorts of hardware 
> flavors), IRIX (5.3 and 6.2), NeXTStep / OpenStep (on four platforms), 
> AIX (4.3 only), and NetBSD (on all sorts of hardware flavors), all 
> available, all with serial console access via a MUX, all with X10 power 
> controls in case someone wanted to do OS development.  Now it's the 
> portability lab for SingleHelix, where it actually gets used.
> 
> Am I bitter?  Yeah, you could say that.  OSS should NOT equal Linux, but
> it does in the minds of far too many developers.  Am I making sweeping
> and uninformed generalizations?  Sure!  But that's what I do.
> 
> Reagen
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