Ian has stated that Frost is a separate project, and we should not wait for a usable FMS. (Background: Frost has been severely DoS'ed recently due to being based on KSK queues, and FMS is the answer). Right now we are not actually being DoS'ed, but yesterday we were; the spammer occasionally takes a day off, but IMHO he's likely to stop spamming now until shortly before we ship 0.7.0, and then make Frost unusable again.
1) We could just not ship Frost, in order to meet Ian's totally arbitrary deadline (not that totally arbitrary deadlines aren't of some value!). However IMHO we will have *dramatically* less user retention if we don't have a usable chat client - at least on the order of 50%. This is because Freenet is a community, and no community can function without chat. 2) Or we could ship Frost even though we know it will probably be DoS'ed again, and may be being actively DoS'ed at the point that we ship it. In which case IMHO we should advise users about this fact in our announcement for 0.7.0. Maybe some good publicity will come from it - it could hardly be any worse than us shipping an application which is utterly useless, and each user having to figure that out themselves! Telling users will put them off ... but not telling users will also put them off. 3) Or we could make a working chat system of some kind a release blocker, and act accordingly: review third party code and help in porting FMS to java if that is necessary. At the moment FMS is written in C (and therefore not bundle-able), and uses a combination of HTTP and NNTP interfaces (and therefore is not user friendly). IMHO the critical path would be to translate it to java, implement it as a plugin, implement a separate plugin with a web interface based on that of Worst, bundle those, and let the Frost devs port Frost to use the plugin. Some of this has already been started, but I haven't seen much progress recently on the FMS board (which oddly is the only board never to have been DoS'ed). Important note: We are not quite ready to ship Freenet yet; there is a good deal more debugging needs to be done. IMHO we will be easily ready to ship a release candidate in March, although maybe not 0.7.0 (Ian's deadline is March). Freenet 0.7.0 is likely to be slashdotted; it may not get any wider coverage, since the world has moved on, but we will see. Last time, over two years ago, 0.5.0 got mentioned on ZD Business Week as well as slashdot. We need to make the best possible use of this opportunity - provided that it doesn't delay matters indefinitely. Opinions on which of the above options is most useful? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/support/attachments/20080229/cd651a2b/attachment.pgp>
