This mail is split in 2 parts: 1. A summary of part 2, which also includes stuff which is not in part 2. 2. A copy of a previous reply of mine to a similar proposal. Most of what's said there applies to this as well.
Part 1 follows: I think we shouldn't randomly change our strategy from what it was to something which invalidates all its work by postponing to finish whats half- finished into the far future: You're proposing yet another half a decade of rewriting parts of fred over and over again instead of finally giving people new client apps, which was the goal of my work but isn't finished yet (sorry, it is a complex task :|)... Because let's be honest: If we now installed a fred of 7 years ago, it would by default still ship the same core applications as today: I joined back then to get the WoT-stuff finished to the point where we can enable it by default. So I think we spent more than enough years on only providing fred work. (Yes, it sucks that I still haven't finished WoT+Freetalk, and I'm ashamed of that, but I've been a volunteer and thus had limited time to contribute for 5 of those years, and Freetalk+WoT are major projects. I think they're over 40 000 lines of code already...) This needs to change, and it won't change if we only acquire funding for minor fred features. We need new things such as forums, filesharing, social networking, mail etc. bundled *and* enabled by default; not new minor fred features. Yes, your features are major security enhancements, not minor ones. But to the users, a feature is something which "does" something for the user. Security is merely self-servicing, not serving the user. They wouldn't recognize it as a major new feature. Further, I think people will not pay for Opennet. We cannot call something "Free"net if it costs money. We'd be ridiculed for that. With regards to hardware development: We haven't even ported to Android yet, which is > 1 billion devices. Before we re-invent the wheel by custom embedded hardware, we should maybe first port to the standard embedded hardware everyone uses :) I would support doing that, but not as a mandatory goal of fundraising please. It should be something we do if we get more money than we need. It is a nice goal though: An operating system with 1/8 of all humans using it is not something which can be ignored. I'm thankful for your proposal, and I feel sorry for having to give this strong criticism, but I fear it's necessary: We have only asked 3 entities for money (see the Wiki page [1]). Just because we have temporarily run out of money because we *did not ask for money* doesn't mean we should randomly throw away parts of our work and do stuff which we wouldn't have considered a good idea before. Before we have bothered to try to ask lets say 50, there is no reason to change what we planned to develop anyway. I'd like to close this summary with the conclusion of part 2: > What would be two productive things to continue this discussion with: > > 1) Let's gather a list of news sites which could publish our request for > funding. > > 2) Let's enhance the list of entities to ask for funds: > https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising Part 2 - my reply to Ian's similar proposal... When reading it, please imagine that Ians proposal was replaced with yours: > such as rebuilding FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like > Bootstrap/React and modernizing the installers On Monday, November 16, 2015 07:54:08 PM xor wrote: [...] > On Monday, November 16, 2015 10:52:16 AM Ian Clarke wrote: > > Perhaps we could explore a KickStarter - but that would only work if it is > > to achieve something big and externally very visible (such as rebuilding > > FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like Bootstrap/React and > > modernizing the installers). > > I'm fine with KickStarter, and fine with it's requirement of setting > specific goals. > Albeit I would do KickStarter as a last resort: The requirement of specific > goals is too much of a burden if volunteers are also involved. We don't know > whether suddenly a volunteer appears and provides a whole new bunch of > code. That code then might lack very small changes to be ready for > deployment, so it might be good if I did the changes so we could get the > code out. But that would violate the KickStarter promise of me only working > on the specific KickStarter goals. > Also, it is very difficult to judge complexity of software development, i.e. > whether something will take 6 months or 2 years. I don't know whether > KickStarter requires us to specify a date of delivery though. > > So KickStarter is OK, but as a last resort. > > However, I think the specific goals you suggested are problematic: [...] > But the goal I'm more opposed to is this: > > rebuilding FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like Bootstrap/React > > What you suggest here would be a complete 180° turn of our previous > strategy, and leave all the work towards it in a half-finished state. > > To understand that, let's consider the previous-to-previous strategy: > Toad had spend years, if not a decade, upon shoveling fred code from one > side to the other, i.e. upon improving the core network daemon. He for sure > improved the network a lot: Fred is faster, more reliable, and probably > more secure. > Still, this did yield zero new major user visible features. > By default, we still shipped no working search, no forums, no social > network, no mail, no filesharing. > Yet, implementations of forums, social networks, mail, etc. all existed > already: > https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Projects > They were just too unpolished / slow to be deployed yet. > > So it was decided that it would be a good idea to finally give those > features to the users after they had been rusting for years. > Freenet is pretty boring anyway if it is only static HTML sites. Forums etc. > are alive, and thus much more interesting. > Thus, the previous strategy, which I said your suggestion is breaking with, > was decided: > I was assigned being the "client application maintainer" to get the apps > out. Now both fortunately and unfortunately, all those apps share a single > problem: Due to our anonymous nature, they need spam filtering to prevent > denial of service - because content publishers are anonymous, censors > cannot just kill them to stop them from publishing content, so they are > more likely to use spam as DoS to shut people up. > So while it is good that we have a central spam filter library (the "Web of > Trust" plugin aka WoT) and thus only need to write the code once, this also > meant that it's algorithmic problems had to be fixed before we could deploy > *any* other apps: If WoT is dead-slow, then the apps which use it also will > be dead-slow. > > So I have been working on fixing WoT for the past two years or so, and it is > a lot closer to being ready for installing it by default. > But it is not perfectly finished. > So we still have no forums, social networks, mail, filesharing. > > And if we now do a KickStarter with the goal of "rebuilding > FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like Bootstrap/React and > modernizing the installers", that would mean stopping the strategy of fixing > WoT. > And all the WoT-work of the previous strategy would have been in vain as it > is not completed to the point where we can deploy the actual apps yet. So > with what you recommended, we probably won't have forums / social > networking / file sharing for yet another few years; and we would have > wasted years upon something which we didn't complete yet. > > Please believe me that I'm not barely trying to make my job look significant > here. > It really just boils down to that on me: > We spent half a decade on rewriting stuff, not on new features. We need new > features now. Static HTML freesites are boring, but it's all we ship by > default. Spending more years on rewriting the static HTML displaying > framework will not improve this at all. > And we already *HAVE* the new apps people would like to see deployed, we > just need to finish WoT to get them deployable, and then to polish them a > bit on their own. > > So anyway: Thanks for your efforts to push us to get things done. > Let's maybe just avoid specific technical suggestions for a while: > I feel a certain kind of burnout symptoms from all the flamewars here > recently, and I would be happy if we could just avoid potential hot hopics > such as "rewrite X" suggestions :) > The whole rewriting ideas maybe are ended best with this article: > http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html > > Please don't feel like I'm trying to shut you up, I'm rather just looking to > steer the discussion into more productive directions than > rewrite-discussions. > > What would be two productive things to continue this discussion with: > > 1) Let's gather a list of news sites which could publish our request for > funding. > > 2) Let's enhance the list of entities to ask for funds: > https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising > > If you don't have a Wiki account, you can ask me for one by telling me your > desired username; or just mail your suggested Wiki changes to the list. I'll > add them to the Wiki then. [1] https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising
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