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List:       leaf-devel
Subject:    [leaf-devel] LRP -> LEAF History
From:       Charles Steinkuehler <charles () steinkuehler ! net>
Date:       2003-06-24 1:07:32
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Erich Titl wrote:
> Mike and Ray
> 
> Thanks for the info, I think I got the gist and please excuse if I was 
> nosy. I just happened not to be on either list those days and feel it is a 
> shame that someone with Dave C.'s talent seems to go down the drain, his 
> political opinion notwithstanding.

I think it's also important to point out a few additional facts.  Mike's 
timeline has the major points, but is missing details and the reasons 
behind what happened.

While every person has their individual reasons for their own actions, 
I'll try to consicely explain my view of the split between the initial 
LEAF founders and LRP.

Prior to the formation of the LEAF project group, there were many users 
of Dave C.'s LRP who had made various modifications, extentions, and 
enhancements.  These contributions from the user base included 
everything from simple bug fixes and documtation to new packages and 
extensive updates (such as Matthew Grant's update to the 2.2 kernel and 
built-in firewall rule generator, which I based my relases on).

Virtually without exception, Dave C. refused to incorperate any external 
  contributions to LRP, prompting the creation of *NUMEROUS* LRP-related 
sites around the web as each user who wished to share their 
contributions with the user community was forced into creating their own 
personal LRP page or website.

As more and more of these sites popped up, and more folks started using 
LRP (which I like to think is at least partly due to the easy to use 
disk images I created based on Matthew Grant's Materhorn release :), 
there began to be a concerted effort to get community content 
incorperated to the main linuxrouter.org site run by Dave C.  As 
repeated efforts to get community provided updates into the "official" 
LRP failed, several of the key members of the LRP user community (myself 
included) started an attempt to create a "catch-all" or "unofficial" LRP 
site with the goal of making the currently wide-spread user supplied 
enhancements to LRP easily available (and findable) by all.  There were 
already a few sites like this around run by individuals (especially Rick 
O.'s lrp.c0wz.com), but it was generally agreed that a site with the 
backing of a large number of the primary supporters of LRP (ie the folks 
answering most of the questions on the mailing list) would be more 
"official" than any one person's single site, and maintainence work 
could be divided among many people, avoiding the inevitable problems 
when a person's interest in (or avaibable free time for) the project waned.

Thus began the linuxrouter sorceforge project, which rapidly began 
collecting content from the many individual LRP sites around the 'net. 
Perhaps a victim of it's own success, shortly after the creation of the 
project, Dave C. threatened to have sourceforge shut down the project as 
he felt we were usurping the linuxrouter name.

Not wishing to force a confrontation, the linuxrouter sourceforge 
project was mothballed and resurrected as LEAF, which was generally 
agreed to stand for Linux Embedded/Enabled Application 
Firewall/Framework, although was mainly a short, untaken SF project name 
that represented the fact we were "branching" away from the main 
linuxrouter "tree".

At this point, LEAF was still primarily a site dedicated to organizing 
community generated content and enhancements for LRP, and mainly existed 
to provide an easy way for the community to share enhancements.  Mailing 
lists were setup to provide support for some of the "rouge" 
distributions available (such as my Materhorn and Eiger releases, and 
David D.'s Oxygen), but pretty much all core developers and support folk 
were active on both LEAF and LRP mailing lists.

Then came the McVeigh incident.  Dave C. shut down the LRP website and 
LRP mailing lists for political reasons (you should get the copy of what 
the site looked like from Mike, if you haven't already).  Dave had 
previously posted the web server and lists would be unavailable, but had 
not mentioned why (most folks just assumed a routine maintainence 
outage).  When it became apparent that the website and list had not only 
been shutdown for political reasons, but had been replaced with 
ideological content most of the user and developer community disagreed 
with, the exodus started.

Most (if not all) of the active developers and supporters who were 
subscribed to both LEAF and LRP lists gracefully excused themselves from 
the LRP mailing lists, and supported users only via the LEAF project 
lists.  Very quickly, the once very active LRP list became a virtual 
ghost town, as the users and message traffic migrated to the LEAF lists 
where questions were still being answered (actual help from Dave C. had 
been and continued to be pretty rare on the LRP lists).

While I did not approve of or agree with the content Dave C. used to 
replace the linuxrouter.org site, I do support his right to have his 
opinion (that's what defending free speech is about).  I strongly 
objected, however, to his use of a non-political software project to 
promote his political agenda.  Combined with the historical difficulty 
of getting Dave C. to incorperate *ANY* community provided enhancements 
to LRP, this is why I fully migrated to LEAF.

Flames/comments/questions welcome

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles@steinkuehler.net




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