On 30/11/15 18:11, xor wrote: > 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 :|)...
Client apps are important. If we can get funding for them then it'd be great to have somebody working full time on them. > 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...) And for much of that time you've been a paid developer and still made limited progress. These things are hard. We need enough funding that we can improve several different areas of Freenet simultaneously IMHO. > 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. I include the rest under item 7. I'm certainly not arguing that we should only ask for money for improving Fred's security! I do think it should be part of what we are looking for. One advantage of my proposal is if it worked it would generate sufficient funds to hire several developers for a year. I believe we estimate $100K/year/dev including costs, so in fact it would be 10 person-years. IMHO that's the sort of scale that we should be aiming at. I appreciate that for funding body applications we may need to start lower. > 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. English sucks (libre vs gratis, free software versus free spyware services). Most languages don't have this problem. However, as I have repeatedly explained, people only need to pay if they want to run a core opennet node. Non-core (possibly transient) opennet nodes can run, and so can darknet nodes. And they will have better security because they can tunnel through the core nodes. > 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. An operating system used exclusively on mobile devices which are specifically designed to store everything in the cloud. P2P simply doesn't work on mobile, because of battery life, even if we ignore all the other problems (such as carriers blocking it). There are good reasons to have some Freenet code on Android however. We have an app for node reference exchange, and it would be a good idea to extend it to interface to a fixed node. And porting to Android is relatively easy because the non-GUI parts are very similar to Java. > 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. Funding agencies will only give us money if we have a track record. So we will have to start small or get very lucky. And that limits the range of bodies we can apply to. And so on. It's worth trying, but it's hard. I personally got out of Freenet partly because I didn't want to get into that game. Retrospectively I think I could probably have done reasonably well at it, but sadly I don't have the time right now. > 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 I am not asking that we rewrite Fred, or any of the plugins, from scratch. I think that would be very foolish, not least in terms of the effect on volunteers who have contributed to them. I do think that work on usability is important. But it can't be all that we do. Similarly, recent work to update the website has been very productive, but we do also need to get a release out. > 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. The whole idea with KickStarter is you get funding to pay people to implement the goals! The work needed to set up your pitch etc is a major issue though. In any case, I absolutely agree that we should aim to have sufficient funds to pay somebody to fix WoT, amongst other goals. The only way I personally would come back to Freenet on a paid basis is if we had significant funding - large enough that I wasn't the only paid developer!
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