Roadshow for 68K -Needs your support!

[olsen]

Would you mind sharing exactly what those are?

For example multicast, does Roadshow do multicast at all?

Roadshow supports ZeroConf network interface configuration, if there's no DHCP server around, for example. The API is much richer than the original AmiTCP design, allowing you to control the operation and configuration of the TCP/IP stack through AmigaOS-like functions, with hooks and tagitem lists. Also, you have access to the inner workings of the packet and connection dispatch and can plug in filters of your own choice to implement something like ZoneAlarm for Windows. I also wrote my own PPP and PPPoE drivers from scratch, which are faster than what Miami and AmiTCP Genesis had to offer.

The SDK is quite nice. It even has sample code and a tcpdump port which uses Roadshow's built-in Berkeley socket filter.

As for multicast, Roadshow does what can be done within the limitations of the SANA-II driver framework. The number of multicast addresses to listen to is limited by the design of the S2_ADDMULTICASTADDRESS command.

I'm probably the only person in the entire Amiga community who gives a rats ass about IPv6, but I'll repeat it - IPv6 is coming, whether people like it or not, and IPv4 will in short time (in amiga terms anyways) be obsoleted. Tough luck for those who want to use any of the NG systems as some sort of main system, and those who think a clever router will solve all your problems, then please elaborate how that is supposed to happen.

 
To support IPv6 properly, a new TCP/IP stack has to be ported. There's a compatibility layer developed for the 4.4BSD stack at the University of Lausanne, which Miami would use, but I suspect its functionality is hardly adequate any more.

For the time being I reckon there's a time window of at least 2-3 years left during which too many existing IPv4 devices have to be supported to make it easy to switch to IPv6, at least as far as the common end user is concerned (business operations will be a different matter; if you're running your own BGP router in the basement you'll have to switch sooner than later). Your typical ISP will likely switch your cable modem or ADSL service concentrator to IPv4 operations and internally reroute the traffic through a 4to6 proxy.

I agree that this issue has to be addressed, eventually, I just don't see it coming around the corner just yet.

I consider any development done by anyone who signs NDA with Hyperion as in-house, it's as close to in-house they can get anyhow - I do not have any illusion of Hyperion actually having a house... heh... :laughing:

Aren't we being negative today?

 So in reality, you dont own it, and appearantly you're not pleased with that fact.

Could be worse. If I were completely free to make the software open, I could just dump the thing and leave it to its own devices. My suspicion is that it would stay largely untouched and unloved. The whole premise that once a package is open sourced great things are inevitably going to happen to it is too optimistic.

Sure, but a TCP stack? Considering that a vast majority of those running 68k software are doing so in UAE where bsdsocket.device is offered by emulator, I doubt that there really are that many.

Could be, but some funny things are possible with a 68k TCP/IP stack that runs inside the emulation rather than interfaces to the host's TCP/IP stack by means of a proxy. For example, take IPv6 support. The code that's hard-wired to WinUAE will stay AmiTCP V3 compatible until the bitter end.

No doubt, but I really don't see one single person being able to maintain an entire IP stack over time, it just isn't realistic.

Come on, this code was so mature in 1994 that it, essentially, has not changed in more than a decade since. The integration of IPv6 in FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD happened alongside the existing IPv4 support, and any major changes that went into the IPv4 code were concerned with security enhancements, bug fixes and very few functional additions, such as for T/TCP.

The last bug fix I applied to the mainline TCP/IP code came from "archeological research" in code that was at the time more than 20 years old. That was in 2007.

It's not as if you have to keep up with a boatload of code changes to keep this TCP/IP stack implementation reasonably robust and sound. One man can do it.

[olsen]

Sure open sourcing doesn't guarantee anything, but I don't see this being "untouched". I'm pretty sure AROS would like to incorporate it, and I can see 68k users getting involved too. For me personally, I find that I end up working on applications that I use that are open source, or at least contributing back something.

As you are unable to do this anyway, it's probably not worth discussing though right?

Give it some time...

Or spend some effort on porting your own TCP/IP stack. If Holger Kruse and yours truly could do it, so can anybody else. Here's how:

1) You have to have a working 'C' compiler setup with a debugger and advanced knowledge of Amiga system programming.

2) Buy quality professional documentation on the 4.4BSD-Lite2 TCP/IP stack, which is technically still the reference implementation for all the TCP/IP stacks that were developed from it, e.g. in OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD. I bought "TCP/IP illustrated, vol. 2" by W. Richard Stevens & Gary R. Wright and "Unix network programming, vol. 1, Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI" by W. Richard Stevens. You can buy used books, as the information concerning 4.4BSD-Lite2 was valid and current even 10 years ago.

3) Find and download the 4.4BSD-Lite2 operating system source code, including the utilities. This isn't hard to do. Google is your friend, e.g. try "ftp://ftp.dlut.edu.cn/pub1/unix/bsd-source/4.4BSD-Lite2.tar.gz".

4) Find and download the source code for AmiTCP V2.2 and the documentation that went along with it. It's still available from Aminet. While the code itself doesn't work perfectly, it still shows how the clever folks who wrote AmiTCP made it work on the Amiga. This is practically a blueprint for writing an Amiga TCP/IP stack based upon the BSD code.

5) Learn how the SANA-II device driver API works. The documentation is found on the Amiga Developer CD 2.1, for example.

There's a lot to learn from the two books, and you might want to get really familiar with the SANA-II documentation. Dig into the AmiTCP V2 source code and understand how it relates to the 4.4BSDLite-2 code.

Take care of this and you're set. If you're very motivated, you can port the whole thing in about two weeks, have the basic AmiTCP API up an running and run a web browser on top of it. It can be done.

[olsen]

Not sure I have the interest in such a project "from scratch" nor the time (and I have no doubt my level of Amiga coding is not up to yours!).

Well, the question came up if I were interest to contribute the hard work of some odd 6-7 years to the open source pool, which for Amiga software hasn't been drawing that much water lately.

For me that question always has the tang of abandonware: you can't really do business in this market situation, so it's probably not such a big step to throw in the towel and just dump the product. Great things are then going to happen to it. Well, in the next 5-6 years probably will. Have to. Manifest destiny, if anything.

From my humble experience in this magic field of open source software, the best and the most loved software came about because somebody needed to scratch an itch, and did so by getting involved writing the code he needed.

The last thing the Amiga needs is more clamoring for free, and rather complex software, while at the same time the number of people who could create that complex software just keeps on shrinking and shrinking.

This stuff doesn't write or port itself. Some things are best done if you do them yourself. End of sermon.

Also seems a shame to keep re-inventing the wheel, due to licensing and the death on previous projects. I suppose a project like this would be good to learn the ins and outs of tcp/ip though.

Not a lot of people know how to use or even write a SANA-II device driver. Not a lot of people know how to program TCP/IP stack client software. Not a lot of people know how to implement a TCP/IP stack for the Amiga. And so on.

Saying that it's a shame to reinvent the wheel when the last guy who made a wheel isn't going to make any more wheels inevitably leads to the cart breaking down. It may be possible to borrow or steal another wheel, but this will only get you so far. At some point somebody will have to make more wheels. And the best reason for reinventing the wheel has always been: to make more wheels.

[olsen]

I agree... But seems like people like to do it in this Amiga world: TCP/IP stack ported 3 times,

I think your number is off. We had six different TCP/IP stacks so far: A225 (Commodore), AS225 (Commodore, cancelled product; later released as INet-225), AmiTCP, Miami, Termite, Roadshow. A225 was a static link library. AS225 was a shared library. AmiTCP, Miami, Termite and Roadshow were all shared libraries using the same basic API. AS225 and AmiTCP were not compatible.

the whole OS rewritten 3 times (AROS, MorphOS, OS4 which had to rewrite lots of parts), applications ported 3 times (MUI/Gadtools, MorphOS/OS4/AROS,...),...

We could have a lot more apps and more modern OS if people were cooperating instead of fighting each other with closed source apps, stupid contracts,... since a decade.

Closed source apps meant competition and a market, as long as the market existed. I'm not sure we have had one in the last 15 years.

Whoever wants to build and maintain an operating system probably isn't exactly in the same camp as an application software developer.

Cooperation only exists if there is a common ground. If the work being done leads to commercial work, you absolutely have to have competition. OK, it's one thing to be competetive and another thing to be snide and aggressive about it. We certainly had our share of drama queens and fanboys in this field, and this isn't going to change. If you cared about the Amiga you were probably really passionate about it, too. It's natural that the end result can involve the bile and the trolling we all came to expect.

Well, you don't have to like it, and you don't have to play that game.

Given how software developers tend to be, often socially somewhat inept, it's kinda inevitable that sparks will fly because of a failure to communicate what's being done, and why. Amiga software developers can play nice, they just didn't always do. Given that Commodore was always such an inept and weak force in the Amiga business, the 3rd party developers came to dominate the business. And this culture has persisted, with the nasty side-effects of the bullying and the name-calling.

If you ask for cooperation you ask for some degree of level-headedness and maturity. Funny thing: whenever somebody asks for exactly these two to be applied he's almost certainly not going to get them.

What can you do? Write your software, have fun with it, be a good boy and play nice with the others. But there's not that much software being written today, is there? The bickering is so much more productive.

[olsen]

@olsen
The "amigazation" and access to inner workings of packets and connections is very nice.

It's better than learning how to wrestle with the Unix APIs. The Unix APIs are still there if they are needed, but if you want to do interesting things, easier access to the power of the TCP/IP stack will get you there faster. I always believed in putting a match and a stick of dynamite into the hands of the developer, and leave him to figure out what to do with those two.

I have never had need for PPPoE, but PPP I use quite a bit, "tethering" (?), or lately on MiniMig using nullmodem or bluetooth link, and my experience is that stability is a heck lot more important than speed.

Stability can be a difficult thing with PPP. The problem with PPP was that quite a number of implementations were deployed while the specs were still under development. There's a nice book documenting PPP which came out of Sun, Inc. that details the gory bits, what works, what doesn't always work, and where the dragons are.

If you write your PPP driver from the specs chances are that there will be interoperability issues. If you port the Unix/BSD/Solaris PPP code you may end up having to jump through a number of hoops if your system's target architecture does not match the one the PPP code was written for. This happened, for example, with the Linux PPPoE daemon: it actually converts PPP packets intended for serial communications into PPPoE frames, and the other way round.

The code I came up should work reasonably well. It did outperform Holger Kruse's own ppp.device, and the PPPoE support provided by the special ppp-ethernet.device has extremely low overhead.

Zeroconf is nice (never needed it), but what I miss is media players capable of playing content streamed over multicast, which means support for PIM-SM, SDM, SSM...

Only one way to find out if it works.

Mind you, not all SANA-II Ethernet drivers support multicast operations robustly.

As for IPv6, I think it's probably best to use KAME, since that is what "all the others" in the BSD camp are using already.

NetBSD took its sweet time integrating KAME into the mainline code, from where it spread to the other members of the family. I think this is the smart way to approach it: use the integrated code and try to not repeat the process yourself. By now the BSD line of TCP/IP stack code should be so well-groomed that it would be a bad idea not to adapt it, wholesale, for the Amiga. I only got started with 4.4BSDLite-2 in Roadshow because the documentation was so good. If I were to do this again, I'd use a more recent TCP/IP stack implementation.

And as you probably know, it's not just a matter of "switching to IPv6", there's also the issue of running dual stack and deal with various transition technologies.

Like I wrote, were are probably not going to see much of a demand on the consumer's side for IPv6 unless you don't have an ISP which does all the heavy lifting and protocol conversion for you. Given how long a rollout of proper broadband connectivity has taken in Europe already, I wouldn't want to bet on when exactly a move to IPv6 were to happen. Of cause, this IPv4 to IPv6 protocol conversion business stinks, since it defeats the very idea and purpose behind IPv6. But it wouldn't be the first time that business decisions being made keep overriding engineering decisions. ISO networking and protocols died a quiet death while IP was trampling all over it, in spite of the fact that the ISO ideas more often than not were better than what the designers of IP and TCP had come up with in the 1970'ies.

Current estimate for IPv4 exhaustion is summer next year, we ("amiga land") are already a decade late in terms of what should have been done, and at least half a decade behind just about any other platform.

All our APIs are IPv4 only. All our software is IPv4 only. Unless you can get every bit of software rewritten that's already out there, you won't see IPv6 adoption, at least in consumer/user land.

So, please, the priorities are somewhat skewed with Amiga TCP/IP stack software.

And what guarantees are there that you wont do the same when selling it? I mean, seriously, it's not like it would be the first time in history of Amiga that this happens. I'll admit that your promises count alot more than most others, though.

One thing I learned is that promises in the Amiga business tend to last as long as butterfly kisses. Sure, they can be nice, but they are more something of the moment than something that will last and keep you feeling warm and fuzzy all over.

I am not promising anything but that I'll try in my little way to hold up what I believe in.

That's totally beside the point, what is the point is that whoever willing then have a much better chance to fix whatever is bugging him/her without needing to contact some author who's no longer around, doesn't care anymore, no longer has the sources, has changed email address etc.

Sounds like you got burned like the rest of us, huh? This Amiga situation has never been pretty. I still recall how Commodore did business back in the 1990'ies, and that wasn't pretty either. When the company went bust the market turned. Some people got out of it altogether, some people flourished while the going was good, and they all were pretty much overshadowed by the con men, the hucksters and the scum that preys on other people's misery. And the really bad thing was that sometimes couldn't really tell which group the guy you were dealing with belonged to.

So, I can see where you're coming from. Seeing the train rumbling along, with no way to stop it, get it back on the tracks, can be a bitch. I've been on that train myself and found that it took me to strange places. But you don't have to stay where it takes you, and you don't have to like it. Either you get bitter about it, or you try to make that strange place you came to a better place.

I'd rather hang on to the stuff I built and try to make it better. There's a limit to how far this can be done. You can burn out (like I did) along the way, and you can find that your own standards are so hard to attain that you lose a lot of steam.

So there's always a chance that you'll let yourself and everybody else down. I'm not excluding myself from that group. It happened, will happen again. I just hope I'll pick myself up, dust myself off and try again.

I fix things in open source software all the time, but only rarely bother to contribute these fixes back upstream, as they're more quick work-arounds for my particual situations than anything else - I'm after all not a programmer.

Everything good and perfectly alright about it. Hey, I could use a hand maintaining my old code, too. It's just that I'm so old-fashioned that I try to dig myself out of my own mess first before I go about shouting for help. I'm just like that. Why make somebody else's life harder? It's bad enough that I made my own life harder.

Sure, but this is not something "most users" bother with.


Uhm, I dont get this part. The reason to stay AmiTCP V3 compatible is that this is what all software today use. Create an IPv6 stack tomorrow, it will still be the case. Nothing prevents an IPv6 capable bsdsocket.device in UAE.

Perfectly understandable. But without anybody using these toys, how will you build the knowledge of how to use and maintain such software? It's not just about getting the bugs out.

Anyways, WinUAE recently got A2065 emulation (iirc) - so anyone who want to play around with that can do so, but i really don't think there are many.

Well, the a2065.device driver is in really poor condition. The uaenet.device does work better. I suppose the A2065 hardware support came about so that you could use software deployed using the A225 kit. There is not a lot of it about, though. I only recall Maxis' "Robosport" title which supported multiplayer gaming over Ethernet through A225.

OK, I'm almost tempted to register in order to give you hell, then :laughing:

That's the spirit...

Btw - on a related note, people have been moaning about wireless stack for about half a decade as well now, feel free to port wpa_supplicant, opensea, open1x or make your own ... hohum... AirShow too. I can keep you busy there with testing and bug reports for years, really. And funny things are often needed to be changed in the IP stack as well when you start playing with wireless, the OSI model is after all just that - a model, in real life the layers typically become much more entangled

Well, I tend to try and make stuff I'd be likely to use myself. Of all the wireless gadgets I have at home, none I would like to use with an Amiga. Do I have to cook up my own crypto code for that, too? I'd rather not to. This sort of thing always ends in tears, if not worse. So there's probably not going to be any sort of WPA or VPN solution from my side for a while.

PS: Thanks for Term, although I admit I most often end up using VLTjr that doesn't suck up all that much RAM. I once started looking at how to strip off all the unneeded fluff in Term, but like so much I start doing on amiga, it never got far.

Gee, somebody's still looking at 'term'. I'm amazed, puzzled and a bit scared to read about it.

[olsen]

I dont get it, why so many people think open sourcing will save the world. It works well on platforms with large communities of developers and users but its not our current situation. Olaf is around for ages, take care, Raidshow works great as part of OS4, will work great as 68k tcp/ip stack, there are people who would like to purchase it.

So whats kolla's (and few others) problem?

I suspect that this is just the tone of the community these days. Talk, talk, talk rather than do, do, do. It's so much easier to spin stories, to vent frustration in writing than to get out of the car, kick the tires, bend down into the mud and change the flat. You'll get dirty either way, but only one way will get the car moving again.

My little theory is that the Amiga community has learned to become helpless. Which is no surprise given how it has been treated by the people who were supposed to be in control of the platform and the situation. It's really bad if you are first considered an asset and then treated like a bunch of particularly idiotic idiots. Are we such easy marks?

I've always thought of myself as a realist with a nasty pessimistic streak bumping into the realism when I wasn't paying attention. It's so easy to lose heart and become bitter. But if I can drag myself out of the slump, anybody else can do it.

It might help to stow the bitterness, the snappy repartee and the needling. As I wrote, you don't have to play this game, and you don't have to like it. If the doers are constantly getting sniped at by the talkers, how is anybody else supposed to get anything done for the Amiga? If you want to make other people you don't even know miserable, you don't have to do it on an Amiga forum.

Just saying...

[olsen]

Indeed. And don't you think AROS, MorphOS and OS4 all have a common ground (that is OS 3.x compatibility plus PowerPC/x86 native as a base) ?

There's enough common ground for sure, but just as much need to be different and in control of doing what you are doing. The latter can work out to become friendly competition, or it can turn the other way. And it's always so much easier to turn that other way, isn't it?

Now I think you have to be competitive before even thinking about having competition... I don't think the current (and past decade) "competition" gave any positive results. Current competition and closed source only made AROS take more time to get where it is. It also means OS4 still doesn't have an USB stack to the level of the "competition"'s one (AROS/MorphOS Poseidon). And so on... Just because they had to keep reinventing the wheel. Reinventing the wheel is useful if your wheel is better, or has a different goal. And I don't think (just an example) rewriting the same PowerPC Radeon drivers (MorphOS/CGX and OS4/P96) has any use but wasting time and resources.

But I don't see this working out. There is not enough common ground to make shared development possible. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I see this more as a control issue. As long as you can hang onto the stuff you are making, you can be sure that nobody will mess it up but yourself. Since the development "teams" are so small, it's also so much easier to do this stuff all on your own than to make an effort to coordinate with others. Chances are that if you are doing Amiga development work, you never worked in a software development team either. You could learn to do that, and you are bound to make mistakes doing so. Given the Amiga community's capacity for taking offense, this will discourage cooperation even further.

You see where this is leading. This community needs to have its head examined, collectively.

I only see waste of time and resource as a consequence of this competition: I don't see anything positive coming from here... Look: you're not even free to do what you want with the stack *you* wrote. And for what ? Now that MorphOS has its own native stack, what's the point ?

The point is that they are all as much in control of their own destiny as possible, without having to deal with the extra double helping of frustration that comes with coordinating their work with other people. Now if the pressure was sufficiently high, you'd get cooperation out of a situation like this. But in this community I suspect the pressure never was that high, and if it was, the people just threw in the towel, walked away, sometimes into these popular forums where, if anything, you can take out your frustration on other people. Who then, in turn, have some frustration to take out on other people again. It's a suffer-suffer solution. You don't have to be a Buddhist to notice that this isn't how it is supposed to be done, if you know what's good for you.

And, for the record, I had to mull it over what MorphOS would do with its TCP/IP stack before I signed my contract. At the time MorphOS already had a TCP/IP stack up and running. OS4 had none. The decision I made at that point I hoped at least would have some good coming out of it, considering how I boxed myself in.

[olsen]

I have to say Olsen is making all very good points!

Yes, but I'm all talk here, myself. Unless that motivates anybody to examine his motives and become a doer, it's just words on the screen.

I fully agree with you that doing commercial closed source software is not wrong.

And open source software does not at all lead to better products.


But I can see two advantages of open source.

A) Especially for documented and not to big projects - open sourcing them allows more people to learn from it. This is nice.

B) Open sourcing "abandoned" projects is also a nice behaviour.
That AWEB sources where open sourced when the author decided to stop developing them was a good deed. While AWEB did not became a Firefoy killer the open source team working on AWEB did a huge number of bug fixes on AWEB since then.
Quake is another good example. After makind their revenue with the game the sources were released and people could learn from it or port it to other niche platforms as the AMIGA.

I can agree to that.

My point of view, however, is and was that what matters is that somebody has to care about the software first and foremost. If there is nobody who cares enough, then you don't have a product, even if it has been open sourced.

Back in 1999, when the Amiga was on the skids again, I voiced my opinion that it would not be helpful to open source the operating system just now, as had been suggested repeatedly and very strongly at the time. My feeling was that it would stand a better chance if somebody would really want to care for it in the first place, rather than assume that this new process of "open source" would certainly take care of everything, no questions asked.

I never got so much bitter e-mail in response to this my deluded opinion. Even Eric S. Raymond, the man himself, deigned to inform me via e-mail of the error of my ways.

Yes, the process that made the Bazaar can be more productive than the one that made the Cathedral. But in the decade since this idea was brought to the fore it has been thoroughly tested and looked into, and it turned out not to be a silver bullet either. It isn't just the process that matters, it's the people who use it, and the number of people who use it.

Given our shallow puddle of Amiga developer talent, open sourcing a project is not the most effective way to proceed. Put another way, a single lemonade stand is not a Bazaar, and it's certainly not a catheral either.

I think what a real problem with software is that you can no guarantees.
Someone can buy a piece of software as your "Roadshow"-stack today - and tomorrow the author can decide not to support it anymore. This situation kind of sucks.

I think its right to pay a price for a good price of software.
But I think its bad to have no guarentee of support and if the company or developer decides go not support it anymore - not being able to get even the smallest bugfixe or minor enhancements anymore.


I think a good solution would be some sort of "community" contract.
That before a project becomes abandoned the programmer will release the sources like is was done was AWEB.

This is at least my opinion. What do you think?

You sound very positive. Which is a good thing in this Amiga situation, in which people seem to have gotten used to the fact that they will face misery more often than the more desirable alternative.

A community contract I'm not so sure of. We have had organized goodwill operations in the Amiga community by the dozen, and where are we now?

Personally, I'd not start with something that lends itself to shaping into an organization that produces yet more words on the screen. It would help to know what the Amiga community would find helpful, if it were to materialize through the hard work of developers.

If you don't know where to steer this ship, you'll just follow the current, and that current leads to just more bitterness for the Amiga community.

[olsen]

Not sure this analogy works for me, but I think the point is there may well be people who would contribute to an existing piece of software, who wouldn't have the time to make something from scratch anyway. That's at least how I see it.

It definitely is easier to modify something that already exists than to start from scratch. Not all development work has to begin with ideas and no code written to play with.

My belief is that you can learn a lot by starting from scratch in a field which piques your curiousity and in which you had, so far, little experience. It helps you grow as a developer to carry everything in your head that makes up the project you started. To a lesser degree, carrying only part of such a project in your head can be a very rewarding learning experience, too.

It's just that if you can become a master of a field, no matter how small, it will be immensely satisfying and keep driving you to expand your horizon. Given how few Amiga developers are left who even dare to scratch the complex stuff, we need more people willing to master the field, or are at least willing to give it a shot.

A TCP/IP stack is a complex beast, but there are enough breadcrumbs to lead you to building one and learn a lot on the way. This is the kind of project your friendly professor hands you as a thesis project, as it happened for AmiTCP.

[olsen]

I understand that what you're saying is that Amiga as a platform is only meant for developers, an not users.

I would not presume to be so pessimistic. My personal impression is that the number of people who make stuff in this community has dwindled so far that that the relation to the number of people who use the stuff has become unsound.

I'm a developer first and user second, so that may cloud my judgment in this matter, though.

People who for various reasons do not write software themselves should have no saying around here, right?

Now that sounds very pessimistic. Without the user, there is no real place for the developer either.

For one thing, a developer can't create magic in his backroom just for his own enjoyment forever. It has to get into the hands of people who put it to use. More importantly, without the user the developer is in a certain danger to produce something that isn't particularly useful or good.

It's quite like how I see the MorphOS situation; MorphOS is mostly about some developers doing an OS and software for themselves, and the rest of us are just a bunch of annoying whiners who at least should pay to compensate for all the unneeded noise we make.

Developers and users are by nature groups with little overlap. How each group member deals with the other group's members is something that comes down to social aptitude, or the lack of such graces. From my experience, the developer is more likely to offend the user than the other way round.

Who believes he does the dirty work of shaping the software? The developer thinks so, and may even suspect that the user isn't capable of it. Finding and fixing bugs certainly puts a lot of stress on the developer. But it's just as much the user who shapes the software by how he uses it, or fails to be able to use it properly, due to limitations of the design.

It's probably silly to say so, but developer and user are in complementary positions. It's poisonously easy to mislead oneself about this relationship.

[olsen]

And there is where you're flawed - thinking of software as products, that's just way old fashioned.

That's where you make assumptions about why I used the term "product". In the dictionary definition of the term a product is eventually intended for sale. I used the term less precisely as the end result of the process which produced it. I could have used "outcome" instead, but it doesn't really fit the context.

If you have a better term for this thing, let's talk about it.

[olsen]

No, ofcourse not, but it's a tad late to come dragging with this stack now, and many of us much more want to pay a large donation and get the sources too, that's all. It is either that or the old game of dealing with keyfiles, "how many machines am I allowed to use this on", various futile attempts at copy protections that many find of great joy in circumventing, binary patches to fix this and that.. all the nonsense that we have become used to.

I don't have to play that game, and I do not intend to. No keyfiles, no copy protection. If there's going to be an impediment to using Roadshow, it will be in the demo version and nowhere else. I have been around long enough to know how this keyfile and copy protection business pans out. It's a fool's game, to use a more polite term for it.

Instead you could have a "here's my IP stack, here are the sources, here's the license and here's my paypal account - please donate if you find this usefull" - yeah, I know, way too boring, huh?

I cannot part with the source code, but the rest of the list sounds OK to me.

[olsen]

This is just nonsense, first you're saying that you're not so pessimistic, and then you present an even more pessimistic view - seriouslly, if anyone's pessimistic here it is you, and not I  :lol:

Don't try to undercut my pessimism. Just like everybody else I enjoy being miserable.

On a more pessimistic note, I entertain the idea that getting more people to produce software for the Amiga market will be beneficial for the community in general.

That's hardly a danger when you don't really give a rats ass about other users than yourself and maybe the small group of people you share code with.

If anybody claims to consider this a strategy worth following, it's only going to cause grief for him, and others. I can't see this working out any positive way at all. Why write software if you can get thoroughly drunk or high instead? There are shorter and narrower paths to debauchery or enlightenment.

Nonsense - all developers are also users.

So one set overlaps with itself. This isn't what I was saying: the number of producers is by its nature either smaller than the number of consumers, or equal to it. In the field of software it's likely much smaller than the number of consumers, i.e. users. This relation can be sound, or it can be unbalanced. I believe it is unbalanced in the Amiga community.

Since the developer is more inclined to have something that the user wants, so the user retain him-/herself from being upfront with the developer. Also alot of developers are notorious for striking down on anyone who say anything against them - many of them seem to suffer from god syndrom.

Occupational hazard. So what else is new? As I wrote, you don't have to play this game and you don't have to like it.

If you end up in a community where you are likely to be the target of ignorance, delusion and abuse, it's either a sign that the community needs to change, or to leave that community. Neither path may be easy.

There's lots of crap software around, and many developers are easily offended if you criticize their work, and they typically have a certain following of mostly ignorant groupies.

So? What responsibility do you have regarding what other people think? Holding a particular point of view is not an offensive tactic.

For example, I have been quite critical about certain developments in both OS4 and MorphOS, since I think lots of the choices made there are just totally bogus and more or less destroy what I find cool about Amiga, turning the OSes more into flawed Windows wannabes than cool Amiga systems.

Join the club. Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. Now what would be worse or better is a matter of opinion. The question is if you can make your voice heard and affect how the change plays out.

It's far from obvious how the current state of affairs in either camp will shape the development paths. I know, personally, that some of the choices I made for Roadshow did not work out so well, and the really bad thing (at least for me) is that finding an alternative is even more difficult to come up with than the original, (and in retrospect) flawed idea. You just can't predict all the outcomes and side-effects of any decision you make in software development. Your choices and your mistakes will catch up with you.

So we end up with things that don't match our intentions, even if we were not part of the decision making. Some of the decision making comes out of business practice, but in this Amiga business, a good part comes out of engineering. And engineering is susceptible to reason and reality. If you can make a case for what you feel is important, it's possible that it will have an effect in the engineering domain.

Of course, it helps if your creds include a bit of an engineering background. And if your input is not heard or heard, but ignored, it might not because your creds are considered to be lacking, it might just be insecurity on the part of the decision makers. Don't pity these guys, they have to make decisions in a high-risk environment. Making ever so slightly flawed decisions is part of the job.

How you deal with these conditions is up to you, of course. You can become bitter about it, you can consider this a reinforcement of your idea of being helpless, you can keep organizing your claim and ideas and keep trying. Just to name a few options.

So I'm officially a troll in both camps.

You're a troll as long as want to be a troll. Are you content being one?

[olsen]

If by troll you mean someone who bothers to criticize the "progress" made in mentioned systems, then sure, I'm quite content. Hardly a day go by without me trolling.

Call me thick, but trolling usually involves baiting and watching for the resulting hullabaloo to tear a discussion apart. In its most benign form it can be a mild prank. At the other end of the spectrum it's a contagious he-said-she-said form of clusterbombing a community. Guaranteed to tarnish your karma if you follow it to the deep end.

For sure, criticism looks different. If you intend to make a point and be taken seriously, any form of pranks or trolling is guaranteed to undermine your credibility. Do it often enough and your chances become slimmer to ever become a contributing voice to the discussion. If what you really wanted was to make yourself heard, it will only become the more frustrating if you're being labeled a troll and get ignored. Don't mix your signals...

[olsen]

And thanks to the political nonsense, people with slighly other vision than "the officials" will never bother to involve themselves either. This is one of the reasons so many developers have fled.

If your daily work and commitment to a project involves making a contribution that implies a certain amount of risk-taking, it entitles you to take part in making decisions which you may not have to justify to anybody else. You should explain them, if you can, considering their impact on the existing community. I personally believe you have a duty to explain yourself, if not just to clear up any misconceptions your actions may leave.

But if your involvement does not even extend to the same degree of risk-taking then your criticism will not have the same degree of impact. It's as simple as that. This can be frustrating for sure. If you do not get involved in the game, you can't play.

I've noticed that the Friedens are getting fed up as well, with some luck OS4 is soon dead in water, and Hyperion launches some commercial desktop for Linux or whatever, as OS5, based on Qt it seems. And it too will fail, but who gives a damn...

If you think ill of the people who you merely disagree with, it will cloud your judgment. If you publicly wish them ill, it will reduce your standing in the public eye. This is the path best not taken.

You can disagree with anybody, but your chances to successfully understand what they are trying to achieve, and your chances to influence their decision making will be slim if you view them disagreeing with you in such a dismal light.

[olsen]

About the missing GUI, I would happily use the stack without, provided basic documentation for the configuration files is present. (I am sure they will be).

The documentation for the OS4 Roadshow is in decent shape, but I think I should do better.

Regarding the distribution media, personally I would prefer a download. However, with this method I can foresee some users asking you for a re-download later on though.

That calls for a certain, more refined infrastructure, and registration. Without the registration, there would be no re-downloads, of course.

Provided that NAT functionality is possible, 50 euro would not make me think twice, but I agree with other post'ers, that a low price certainly may invite to buy.

Well... 50€ is likely far too much for what Roadshow offers right now. The NAT is part of the IP filter package. It works, but it requires a certain amount of preparation and understanding to get it going. Sample scripts are provided for setting up the filter and the NAT. I've successfully used my A3000UX as a firewall/gateway for the rest of my wired LAN.

For the support load on the author, I would like to point tothe, in my view, back then, very well working solution which the MiamiDx author used, the MiamiDx mailing list, where users helped users. Perhaps this, the idea of users helping users being the base support method, could possibly leave you in a more relaxed position.

You'd have to have a dedicated forum for that. Hm... I have little experience with setting something like that up. Any suggestions?

I still have a system running 24/7/365, with uptimes passing the 200 days mark, and would still very much like to try out Roadshow as the main router for my lan, for an interesting comparison to MiamiDx in the same setup.

That may indeed turn out to be very interesting. I do not recall running Roadshow for such prolonged periods of time. AmigaOS is a single user, desktop operating system after all, isn't it? I rarely left my Amiga turned on for more than 24 hours. The cooling fans and the SCSI disk drive are just too loud.

A side note; I feel you should have semi-included AmigaNOS in your list of tcp/ip implementations, however I know that it is mainly for radio amateur use and not for use by the masses. I used it with an AX25 modem on my A1000, and it was great fun improving functionality and make it compile on latest sas/c version.

I'm sorry, AmigaNOS did not come to my mind. I never used it, but I darkly remember that it had been around for a long time while the Amiga TCP/IP solutions were just taking baby steps.

Oh My God, Another Stack

And I thought it was full of stars ;-)