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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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