[Discuss] Debian 12 in the Cloud

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

> On Fri, 31 May 2024 10:07:29 -0700
> Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
...
...
...
>
> If you're going to lay blame on anyone, blame it on all of us who put
> our mission critical applications on libraries maintained by lone
> individuals in their spare time. Because this is the real reason, the
> real root cause, for this. One lone individual manipulated by a
> (probably) well-funded (probably) state actor.

Owning an open source project was a horrible time for me. I wrote a shared
in-memory session manager for PHP about 25 years ago. It's job was to
manage ephemeral session information for a load-balanced set of servers,
it would pull session data from a database, manage it in-ram, save it at
specific "save-points" (purchases, explicit logouts, etc.). When the
session "expired" it would also be written. It also handled atomic update
of global values to implement polls and stuff. I had a postgresql
extension that could use session information as a virtual row in a query.

It really made a lot of bad PHP database code go away and eliminated a lot
of disk I/O which sped up websites as well. I had a few commercial users
that sent me $100. WooHoo! (sarcasm)

Toward's the end, it had bindings for PostgreSQL, SQLite3 and raw files
for the backend, and PHP, Java, and C++ binary that could be used in CGI
scripts. I implemented an active/passive system. I added a plug-in
architecture so that users could add more internal functions.

It was downloaded a lot, and I had about 20 or so technical questions a
week. Why this doesn't work or why that didn't work. (Hint: no one reads
instructions)

It didn't matter too much at first because I was using it for a project.
When I was finished with that project, I kind of hoped a community would
form and take it. I had a few members of the PHP dev community who really
liked it.

Looking back, I think I tried too hard. I listened to too many people
suggesting enhancements. No one ever sent a patch. I did the work
basically for free.

It seemed like it could be something at the beginning. I had a couple
commercial sites that loved it, but over time, unless you get wide spread
adoption and are seen as important to RedHat or others, you are doing it
for free and on your own. It can be thankless.

20 years ago I sent a "I'm not doing it anymore" email and never looked back.

The XKCD comic is 100% exactly right. I fear that this is possibly the
Achilles heal of open source.


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