Hey guys, After reading those pathetic posts from that authoritarian wanker Martin just now, there's another issue that's leapt out of background and right into the foreground.
The issue is Freenet's current dependency on a couple of core developers, which puts the entire Freenet project and concept at a strategic disadvantage, even in potential jeopardy. IMO, every developer needs to consider the following scenario: Some fuckhead like Martin tracert's him, bribes a fed or pulls a string for access to the carnivore log, gets his home address and does the unthinkable, as has happened so many times to controversial figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Larry Flynt and Abraham Lincoln. Of if such developer checks in for a long stay in Club Fed. How would the Freenet project cope? Like, if Oskar, Ian and Tavin got taken out of play, how would the Freenet project fare? I feel that any developer who really practises the Freenet philosophy would ensure that, in his absence, the project can continue unhindered. I've tried to apply this myself. With FreeWeb. I estimate there's a global pool of 10,000 to 50,000 developers with sufficient MSVC/MFC skills to pick it up and get fully fluent within 3 days or less. With fcptools, there would be as many or more developers who could master that in a similarly short time, largely thanks to the excellent FCP spec on the Freenet website. I've tried to make the code quite reasonably readable, with explicit comments and simple structure, and not pose too much of a barrier to incoming devs. But consider the freenet node code. How many developers would there be in the world who could pick it up within (say) a week or less? I know I couldn't, but that's partly due to my ignorance of and present discomfort with java. But I do venture to suggest that most fluent java programmers would find it intimidating. I've known the perverse satisfaction of writing something in a way that only I can understand. For instance, back in 1985, I wrote an Apple ][ utility in Forth to read pictures of any format and print them out to all (then) available printer types. I egotistically got off on the fact that no-one else could figure out the code. But a move to AAP-Reuters R&D division cured me of that, when a staunch team leader taught me the value of specs and readable code, and punished my evil ways by assigning me to fix a mess of code that 2 crazy Polish programmers had left behind. So how about it guys? How about a decent, complete and up-to-date FNP spec? How about some internals doco for the java node, complete with structure diagrams, dataflow diagrams, state diagrams, data dictionaries etc? Wouldn't you want Freenet to keep going if you got 'thraxed? Thoughts? David _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl
