On Monday, November 16, 2015 10:52:16 AM Ian Clarke wrote: > I am pretty convinced that it would be a bad idea to allow Xor to continue > working if the project doesn't have sufficient funds. > > Aside from any potential legal problems, imagine what our pitch to donors > becomes at that point - "Hey, donate money so that we can pay off our > debts". Not exactly a compelling pitch :/ > > And meanwhile Xor is potentially getting himself into a difficult financial > situation.
Argh, I had just messaged you that I'd like to postpone the final discussion of my offer "continue working with payment delayed as interest-free debt" until Thursday :| I need to figure out some real life stuff related to that. But well, my offer still is available though. Freenet is more important to me than some temporary financial hassle. Thursday will just make me figure out how bad a "no" to my offer would be for me, which is why I'd prefer to not hear the decision until then. But, as said elsewhere, even if my offer is not accepted, I will: 1) *not* seek a different job for now (= a year at least probably) and use my free time to resolve the major real life house cleanup/selling for my mom. 2) stay available to resume my job once we have funding - my mom for sure would accept me to reduce my efforts for her at any time. 3) voluntarily continue replying on IRC / the mailing lists. 4) voluntarily at least provide very basic maintenance for Web of Trust / Freetalk to prevent user frustration. So please keep bug reports directed at me :) Nevertheless, please do notice that I cannot "officially" provide volunteering anymore due to my life situation. I am only offering this to keep the project alive by dealing with urgent stuff. There is years work of worth at my mom's to be done, and if I do invest my spare motivation for volunteering, it should be for her first (yes, she'll pay me food, but that's about it :). So please just keep on mind that it would be a benefit if I could return to paid work ASAP, as earning money is something I could justify to have a similarly significant priority. I'll try to do my part in ensuring resuming of my job by helping at the fundraising efforts. > If we want > Xor to keep working, we need a strategy for raising more money. I think > this strategy will need to be to achieve specific goals that we lay out. I'd say we already have a strategy: 0a) Finish the fundraising bar on the website. Done already by the volunteers! Thanks again. 0b) Maybe deploy the next Freenet release so my work of the past 6 months is available to the users actually. Would be polite to provide the result of the previous money to the users before asking for more money. The code is finished from my side, it is just waiting for a fred release to be bundled with. Steve needs to decide whether this can happen soon, or will take too long. If it takes to long, we can ignore this step. 1) Put a news article on website titled "We've run out of money". Notice: I suggested the prerequisite of first writing a huge list of news sites to submit it to. We need to do this *first* before putting the article up because: "News" contains "new". If it takes us too long to submit the article, it will be old, and thus news sites will ignore it. So we need to figure out who to send it to first. 2) Submit the article to many news sites. 3) Ask those entities directly for funds: https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising I will try to help with all of the above, if not do them myself. But to be honest I would be happy if I don't have to do it alone: I'm still a programmer, not a marketing guy, so my social skills are limited. Also, there are potentially thousands of entities who could be interested in funding us, thanks to the NSA scandal. Probably too much work for one person to talk to them all. > 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: > modernizing the installers As far as I know, they have been rewritten from scratch just recently, or do work fine: - The Windows installer was ported from AHK to InnoSetup. - The Mac installer has been rewritten by mrsteveman1 and will be deployed soon. - The Java installer, which basically is the fallback for all other platforms, seems to work. 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. Greetings! -- hopstolive (keyword for Ians spam filter)
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