2003-06-22
LRP == R.I.P. (1997-2002)
With great pain, I must now state:

The operating system that helped to create the embedded Linux marketplace, the Linux Router Project (LRP), is dead.

As of January of this year I have finally accepted the fact I will likely never be able to develop LRP into the operating system it could have been. A full 6 months later I'm forcing myself to update this page to reflect this. It is not an easy thing to give up on your life's work.

I am also now semi-retired as a computer engineer. Aside from my general disgust at the computing industry and what the Internet has become, scrambling around for scrapes of work and praying for the next good money project that eventually ends suddenly in a few months, just isn't keeping food on the table. I've looked quite a bit for some stable work, but plumbers make more hourly then Sys Admins in South Florida. Either I move to California (never!) or move on. I am now reserved to do the latter. With LRP remaining an unachievable goal I don't even feel much desire to work with computers anymore.

My many contributions to the computing community has reaped very little personal benefit for myself. As I now struggle to pay the bills I can not help but feel quite pissed off at the state of affairs, for myself and the other authors who contributed massive amounts of time and quality work, only to have it whored by companies not willing to give back dime one to the people that actually created what it is they sell. Acknowledgement and referral would have at least been acceptable. Few companies do even that.

Care to tell me what Embeddix (for one) is based off of? Ever offer me work Caldera? Even when I asked?

Well actually I'm glad they didn't as I would hate to think I could have benefited those scumbags any further...but I think you, the reader, gets the point I'm making.

Some companies did contribute directly to the project. However a few thousand dollars or a few computers does not let a programmer eat next month. As desperately as I have tried for the last 4 years I have been unable to get any type of sustainable funding for LRP development or steady work which would allow such. (It might have happened late in 2001, but after many 100 hour weeks of coding....that contract was terminated and so were any hopes of dedicating future time to LRP development.)

I actually have done more work on LRP 5.0 then anyone has seen. Yes LRP *5.0*. LRP 4.0 was brought to an alpha stage January 2001 and I was not happy with it. It was a gorgeous rehash of the same old Unix shit. Not acceptable to me. I began to explore some ideas I previously had but thought were not realistic to pursue. They instead turned out to be ideal.

This operating system had a good deal of specifications outlined for it and some preliminary proof-of-concept coding done. To this day I am only beginning to see very minor bits of what I had expected to have in production the summer of 2001. You see, unlike the current pile of Linux distributions which are based on ~20 year old obsolete mechanisms, I was working on something that was from scratch. How different would it have been?

        * A new shell (no bash, no ash, no sh at all!)
        * A new shell scripting language
        * A new (universal) packaging scheme (would retrofit other OSes)
        * A true application management system
        * A new core process management system (No 'init' here...)

That's just a short list from memory, for the sake of making people ill with longing. (YES, YES, Burn with desire! Muhahaha!) Even the syntax for the scripting language was designed. The full architecture for the packaging system was laid out. Oh yeah, and the base of this OS would have all fit in ~8MB of space. The name of this operating system and it's specifications, shall still remain UNRELEASED.

Unfortunately it's not going to happen. Wish it could. I'd like to hope someone with 6 figure$ to burn wants this to happen, but I need to grow up and move on instead of continuing to wait on the tooth fairy to show up to help me persue my artistic dreams.

Oh Well...

My thanks go out to the few people that did help to make happen the LRP that was released. Untrue to the opensource dogma, actually finding people to contribute work to a project is a task in and of itself.

My special thanks to Phil Hands and Paul Russell who helped make the early days possible. I would have never learned to hate Bourne shell at a guru's level without your help. :-)

Paul Wouters, modmaker did more to help LRP proliferate then anyone/thing else. I wish at the time I had realized it's true worth, and encouraged you more with it.

Charles Wright, the only guy who ever really helped with any needed coding of the LRP base.

Vesselin Atanasov, we made portslave into something quite nice.

My eternal disregard also goes out to those that thought they had something to do with LRP but really did nothing for it but complain on the mailing list, and to those that did do something with LRP and never tried to collaborate with me to further the project.

Dave Cinege