[haiku] Re: Non-BFS file system support

Stephan Assmus wrote:

Hi,
Stephan, I don't want to get into an old argument that's off topic for this list. I just tossed up a blog entry in response to this at https://www.raymondrodgers.com:444/blog/entry_26Nov2008170444.html . If you or anyone want(s) to continue to discuss this, feel free to either email me directly, or pop on over to the Themis lists; as I'm the moderator there and they've been basically dead for years any ways, I doubt there will be any significant backlash for going off topic. :-) 

Thanks for your response!

Sorry for responding here instead of at the places you suggested, but I don't 
want to take the time currently to set myself up and respond elsewhere. Also I 
think such philosophical discussions about what motivates ourselves to code 
open source projects in our spare time are relevant on the general Haiku list. 
And that's of course what this is about. :-) Obviously, you are free to code on 
what you like! That's basically a large part of what pretty much every other 
Haiku developer does.

There is another aspect to it though, which is that people out there are 
following the project and have built up expectations of being able to use Haiku 
as their main OS hopefully soon. The same can be said about the very developers 
coding Haiku. We work in this together as a team towards a common goal, which 
is to be able to actually use Haiku. As such, we depend on each other and have 
hopes and expectations about each others contributions. We are making decisions 
together, be it for individual features or for the direction of the project, 
that we can all live with. This shows the team aspect of it and naturally, 
there are expectations and hopes involved that everyone spends the time in a 
way that moves the project forward. I fully realize that we don't have any 
right to expect anything from each other, but the feeling is still there 
somewhere. This just explains why I or others may sometimes put forward these 
result oriented, desperate arguments, while of course everyone is
  free to work on what is fun and interesting to them. When you say Haiku is 
beginning to get it's feet under itself, this is also a result of people like 
Axel, Ingo and others to sometimes do things which are not much fun at all, 
definitely does not interest them, but which need to get done. There are these 
two sides to it, I guess.

Best regards,
-Stephan
I understand and appreciate all of that, and I have nothing against anyone or anything involved with the project. What I meant by Haiku is getting its feet under itself is that it's now getting to a point where it can be used for development, and can be very stable. No insult was intended any where along the road. In years past, I've talked with a number of you on #openbeos before the Haiku name came around, and I admire everything that you all are working for and towards. The people that have poured years of time into developing Haiku have done the damned near impossible in my opinion, and all contributors, past and present, should be congratulated.
I'm not a significant developer any more, and I've barely used my C++ skills in the last four years, and so I don't feel I can contribute meaningfully to any other project at this time. That's why I'm going back to a project I know intimately, and brush up my skills with V8 as well. If my advice or code can be useful in the development of Haiku, a web kit based browser, Firefox, or anything else, I'll gladly contribute it, but I personally find it unlikely. I feel a personal responsibility to and for Themis, its successes and its failures, and as such I would prefer to just continue to work almost anonymously on it rather than to just move on.
My ego would like to say that I can contribute meaningfully elsewhere, but I doubt that's true any more. I fear that I would create more problems in other projects than I would solve. Haiku as the new development platform for Themis will give me the opportunity to finish what was left undone, and correct the problems that I created. A large part of me would like to write off this project and just move on, but I'm responsible for its creation, and for getting it as far as it got. I want to see it reach some level of usability. 

Raymond

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