[IRCServices] I: service for ircu

[Andy Church]

     Just a couple of comments...

>[...] It seems that the majority opinion from
>I am friends with several coders of services. Opus for OtherNet Services,
>Andrew Kempe, current maintainer of ircservices and I would like to count
>Andy Church in that group if I only got to know him more, seems that I don't
>see him interact publicly as often.

     Well, work and lack of a decent net connection (but mostly work) keeps
me away these days... I don't have nearly the kind of time or opportunity
to do net stuff as I used to.  (This is also why I handed Services off in
the first place--I would have loved to be able to keep working on it,
but...)

>GPL coders in general is that their number one issue is that the end user
>isn't satisfied with what is given to them for free, they always want more
>and sometimes go as far as demanding more.

     I have to agree with this.  I do, of course, value _suggestions_ (and
bug reports and other things), but to be perfectly frank, I'm the one doing
the coding--well, not for Services any more, but speaking in general--and I
design programs the way I think best.  Insisting (or repeatedly suggesting)
that I add such-and-such a feature will do nothing except get me frustrated
with you; if I don't like it, it doesn't go in, period.  (Witness the huge
number of times I said no to having ChanServ join channels.)

     As horrible as that sounds, though, I don't do that for the pleasure
of saying no to people (it's not pleasurable at all, just frustrating), but
for the simple reason that I'm only one person and there are only 24 hours
in a day, only a fraction of which I can devote to any given program.  If I
tried to add every feature anyone ever suggested to a program, it would
turn into something like Windows 98--half broken, always crashing and not
making any progress at all.  There are also cases where a request is simply
impossible (or extremely difficult) to implement due to technical
limitations; for example, that oft-requested ChanServ feature would place a
massive processing load on both Services and the network.  To put it
simply, you can't please everyone, and I have to decide how best to use my
limited time; if you don't like the result, all I can do is say I'm sorry
and suggest you write it yourself--after all, the code is available.

     I have to admit I might have been more willing to find time to work on
Services if people in general had been a bit nicer about reading
documentation before asking questions and not being so insistent about
getting their particular desires satisfied.  I'm not a software company
with a contractual obligation to provide support; I offer people my
software because it doesn't cause me much difficulty and because I think it
might be useful, much as I might offer to burn a CD for a friend without a
CD-R drive.  If the friend brought me 100 CDs and demanded that I copy them
all by tomorrow evening, I'd probably say no, because it would be too big a
bother.  Free software is the same way--insisting on getting your way gets
you nowhere except backwards.  There were times I felt I was spending more
time supporting Services than working on it, and more than once I thought
about just pulling it off GPL entirely to spare myself the trouble.

>You also have the option to continue a mutliple ircd services yourself or
>work closely with someone that maybe interested/knowledgable in
>coding,ircservices is still GPL. So as long as GPL licensing is followed you
>may spawn your own services off and continue that way.

     I mentioned this above, but it bears repeating on its own:  Services
is GPL, which means you can get the source and change it yourself (or get
someone to do it for you) if you don't like my adding or not adding some
feature.  Also, as Andrew Kempe said, this sort of coding should become
easier once a module system gets implemented--and I'm working on that
module system right now.

     Well, that ended up a lot longer than I had planned, but there you
have it.  Or something.

  --Andrew Church
    achurch at dragonfire.net
    http://achurch.dragonfire.net/

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