The last days i came across some blogs and boards with discussions about my descission reimplementing FreeNAS (now as the new project OpenMediaVault) on Debian Lenny. Some of these discussions harms me personally which causes me to rethink my work on OMV in generally. Currently i’m thinking about stopping development because it seems to me that there are some people out there that can not respect the work of others (people that are using their spare time to develop free software that does not cost anything, mostly known as open source) and think they could do it better. So to all of you guys, sit down and try your best. Here is a list of what i personally invest to OpenMediaVault till now and you should plan to your project. For FreeNAS you can multiplicate this by 3:
You need about 20-25h a week (sometimes more), 11 months of spare time
If you calculate this by using a moderate 25Euro per h fee (i hear about that some other companies took about 70$, i do not want to give any names here) this is about 27.500 Euro.
Some people said OMV will be only another Linux NAS distro, hmm, did not knew that there are so many distros out there. Most of them i found are commercial, not usable for novice users or absolute crap (sorry). A small side not to all ZFS fanatics, give Nexenta Core based solutions a try and <irony>get happy with their fantastic WebGUI</irony>.
And now my personal thoughts about FreeNAS 7.x. Without the work of Daisuke Aoyama, Michael Zoon or Dan Merschi (sorry to the others i missed here) this project would be dead. But what about the new 8.0? We did not see any screenshots nor have any knowledge about the current state, only promises. What happens to a project if it is lead by commercial interests (now and in future)?
Where are all the people that think they could do it better. Within the 3 years (don’t know it exactly) of working on FreeNAS there were many request to help on developing FreeNAS, but after giving them feedback what they could help, guess what happens, i did never heart of them anymore. The same situation after my descission to switch to Linux. Many have criticized my decision, but none of those offered his help. So, how do it come that they are able to criticize this? If they do have the knowledge to help on topics that are missed in a FreeBSD based FreeNAS why not helping the project? If they do not have the knowledge about issues they’re talking about they should simply keep the mouth. Finally all of those blatherer sucks me.