SubSurface support by users option

[max erenberg]

Is there a way for us users who can't help with the programing of this awesome resource to help and contribute to the cause? Certainly there must be expenses, hosting servers and the like, personal time spent...

How can we help? Kick a few $'s for the service we all use.

The buy Dirk a beer (or beverage of choice) fund whatever. 

I will say than you very much but would like to do more than that.

[Dirk Hohndel]

Hi Max,

This topic comes up every few months and I really appreciate the fact that many, many users over the years have wanted to show their gratitude through financial donations.
I am doing this as a hobby - as I jokingly say, I do this to stay "sane" (for some value of "sane"). It's fun to do (most of the time) and it keeps me doing development work in open source.
I am extremely fortunate in that my 30+ years in open source have ended up leading me to a reasonably well compensated position (as a quick search will show). Quite a while ago I decided to intentionally not take any money from anyone and to simply finance this as a hobby and as something I do for myself. That gives me tremendous freedom. I can say "go away" to people who annoy me, I can ignore requests that are clearly not leading towards success, I can tell dive computer vendors who publicly excuse me of extortion and unethical behavior that I will never support their products in my binaries, no matter what... which to me really is a big part why I think this helps me to stay "sane".

Very long story short: thank you so much. But also, "no thank you".

/D

[JB2Cool]

Max,

There are however ways that you can help. I too am in the situation that although i know about computers i'm not really a software developer/programmer so cannot help with development.

Help comes in many forms and includes but is not limited to:

Testing new releases

Sanity checking new ideas

Telling the developers about your use-case if something they are proposing may change how things work

Improving documentation

Translating Subsurface (please avoid the use of the double capitalisation of S) into different languages

Donating old dive computers for testing

Just saying thank you to the developers occasionally, especially when they are having a bad day

Hope this helps

Jason

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[max erenberg]

Fair enough. But If we should ever cross paths I will insist on buying you a drink or 3. I understand where you're coming from and find no fault in any of that. I do hope you can keep the perspective that the users of this platform appreciate what you have created, and that sometimes it may be them who suffer as the result of any disagreemnts with manufactures regardless of how right you are.

 Truly, thank you!

[Dhaval Giani]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 10:12 AM max erenberg <erenb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Fair enough. But If we should ever cross paths I will insist on buying you a drink or 3. I understand where you're coming from and find no fault in any of that. I do hope you can keep the perspective that the users of this platform appreciate what you have created, and that sometimes it may be them who suffer as the result of any disagreemnts with manufactures regardless of how right you are.

The correct response would be to take it out on the manufacturer as
opposed to a developer of an open source project who does it for fun
without charging you for their labour. Either go to a manufacturer who
isn't that, umm, (deleted expletive here) - or make enough noise to
let the manufacturer know they need to change their behaviour.

Dhaval

> Truly, thank you!
>
> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 12:00:42 PM UTC-5 Dirk wrote:
>>
>> Hi Max,
>>
>> This topic comes up every few months and I really appreciate the fact that many, many users over the years have wanted to show their gratitude through financial donations.
>> I am doing this as a hobby - as I jokingly say, I do this to stay "sane" (for some value of "sane"). It's fun to do (most of the time) and it keeps me doing development work in open source.
>> I am extremely fortunate in that my 30+ years in open source have ended up leading me to a reasonably well compensated position (as a quick search will show). Quite a while ago I decided to intentionally not take any money from anyone and to simply finance this as a hobby and as something I do for myself. That gives me tremendous freedom. I can say "go away" to people who annoy me, I can ignore requests that are clearly not leading towards success, I can tell dive computer vendors who publicly excuse me of extortion and unethical behavior that I will never support their products in my binaries, no matter what... which to me really is a big part why I think this helps me to stay "sane".
>>
>> Very long story short: thank you so much. But also, "no thank you".
>>
>> /D
>>
>> > On Sep 23, 2021, at 9:52 AM, max erenberg wrote:
>> >
>> > Is there a way for us users who can't help with the programing of this awesome resource to help and contribute to the cause? Certainly there must be expenses, hosting servers and the like, personal time spent...
>> >
>> > How can we help? Kick a few $'s for the service we all use.
>> > The buy Dirk a beer (or beverage of choice) fund whatever.
>> > I will say than you very much but would like to do more than that.
>>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Subsurface Divelog" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to subsurface-dive...@googlegroups.com.

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/subsurface-divelog/9eb7bd2e-cb39-46a8-92fb-d6a2cc2f09dfn%40googlegroups.com.

[max erenberg]

I would be more than happy to help in any of these ways I can. More than happy to test new releases etc.

I can also translate anything you want as long as it's into Jive. I'm fluent after watching airplane a dozen times

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 10:07 AM JB2Cool <jb2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There are however ways that you can help. I too am in the situation
> that although i know about computers i'm not really a software
> developer/programmer so cannot help with development.
>
> Help comes in many forms and includes but is not limited to:

100% agreed on those.

And one extra option: just keeping track of issues, and helping people
out here on googlegroups or in other forums.

That may not _directly_ impact development, but having a helpful
community can easily be much more important than random new features.

It also reduces the load on Dirk and people if common issues are
discussed and explained without developers having to get involved.

Linus

[max erenberg]

"The correct response would be to take it out on the manufacturer as 
opposed to a developer of an open source project who does it for fun 
without charging you for their labour. Either go to a manufacturer who 
isn't that, umm, (deleted expletive here) - or make enough noise to 
let the manufacturer know they need to change their behaviour. 

Dhaval "

I'm not trying to take sides, and I understand Dirks position here and support his right to take it. I personally make lots of unpopular stands because i strongly feel I'm right and not taking them would compromise my values. This is Dirks decision to take alone and I support that. Just with time sometimes we humans come to see that maybe the issues are not as big as they seem in the heat of the moment and can allow that maybe there was some miss communication or possibility for misunderstanding by one or more off the parties. Sometimes options present themselves that allow something to happen without having to compromise values or go back on statements because others have done the work and a choice could me made to not prevent that implementation. 

Again, I support whatever decision is made and the point of the original post was to put my money where my mouth was. Instead of money I will explore the other options and am extremely grateful for this platform and wish to see its continued evolution and support for all users

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Sep 23, 2021, at 10:15 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:

>
> On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 10:07 AM JB2Cool wrote:
>>
>> There are however ways that you can help. I too am in the situation
>> that although i know about computers i'm not really a software
>> developer/programmer so cannot help with development.
>>
>> Help comes in many forms and includes but is not limited to:
>
> 100% agreed on those.
>
> And one extra option: just keeping track of issues, and helping people
> out here on googlegroups or in other forums.

And Jason is an absolute ROCK STAR on that.
The amount that help that he has given to users - especially to people
with extremely limited "computer skills" has been incredible.

Kudos.

/D

[Dirk Hohndel]

Max,

I thought about whether I wanted to respond to this or not.

My guess is that almost everyone on this forum won't care about this rant, so unless you want to actually understand the rationale behind my decision, you can safely skip this long message...

> On Sep 23, 2021, at 10:12 AM, max erenberg wrote:
>
> I understand where you're coming from and find no fault in any of that. I do hope you can keep the perspective that the users of this platform appreciate what you have created, and that sometimes it may be them who suffer as the result of any disagreemnts with manufactures regardless of how right you are.

> On Sep 23, 2021, at 10:39 AM, max erenberg wrote:
> Just with time sometimes we humans come to see that maybe the issues are not as big as they seem in the heat of the moment and can allow that maybe there was some miss communication or possibility for misunderstanding by one or more off the parties. Sometimes options present themselves that allow something to happen without having to compromise values or go back on statements because others have done the work and a choice could me made to not prevent that implementation.
>
> Again, I support whatever decision is made and the point of the original post was to put my money where my mouth was. Instead of money I will explore the other options and am extremely grateful for this platform and wish to see its continued evolution and support for all users

I picked out two specific statements from two separate emails and I intentionally removed context - there's a lot of language around it stating that you support the idea that I get to make my own decisions. Thanks for that.

Now, as it turns out, I have discussed this with Linus - after all, he's the one who started Subsurface and I only took over about a year later (almost to the day nine years ago).
Linus strongly urged me to let things go and just support the dive computers for exactly the reason that you state... the users are the ones who end up with no support - and technology trumps personal feelings.

I looked at this very hard and I kept going over the reasoning. Here's where I came down in the end.

For better or worse, this is my project these days.

$ git shortlog -s -n | head
6622 Dirk Hohndel
2140 Berthold Stoeger
1738 Tomaz Canabrava
1031 Miika Turkia
997 Linus Torvalds

While commit counts are a lousy way to track contributions, I have more commits than the next four people combined.

I have been paying for the domain, for the developer certificates (new one for Windows this week, new one for Apple last month), for the web server, for the cloud storage backends (now multiple redundant servers), all of it. I developed the cloud storage backend software by myself. I have carried the support load for this mostly by myself (the in-app support emails go to me only, because the vast majority of emails are either angry rants about how Subsurface-mobile sucks or requests for help with cloud storage... and of course all of the help with cloud storage goes through me).

So - whether people agree or not, I consider this my project.

It's under an open source license, anyone is free to fork it, build their own binaries, website, cloud infrastructure, etc. More power to anyone who wants to do that.
I haven't applied for a trademark, I couldn't even stop someone who wanted to do that from using the same application name (thought I'd ask politely).

The interaction with the Deep6 folks hurt me. So much that I considered walking away from working on Subsurface.
Some of it was in public, some of it wasn't. The Deep6 guys decided to publicly post a very carefully edited set of private emails between us in order to damage my reputation. They lied about quite a few things in the process. They made threats that I found just jaw dropping.

In the open source world, your reputation is your currency. I have been doing this for more than three decades. I'm not Linus, my role in the industry is very different. But my reputation matters to me. Here's someone who tried to damage this reputation because they didn't want to admit that they lied to both me and their customers.

So, do I want to say "oh well, it's all good, I'll support their dive computer and give them a key piece of the infrastructure that they need for their business for free - basically telling them 'what you did was ok, it worked, you got what you wanted'"?
Or do I want to say "no, sorry, this is where I draw the line. I feel bad for the people who bought these dive computers, but I will not support this company with my resources, with my project"

Everyone is entitled to make their own decisions. Everyone is entitled to call me names for my decisions (and trust me, some already have... even though Linus was exceedingly polite when telling me that I was wrong).

But I ended up deciding that this was my line. I came to the conclusion that for my mental health's sake, my choices were (a) walk away and find a different hobby or (b) stick with "my binaries won't support Deep6 dive computers, ever".

For better or worse, I went with (b).

/D

[max erenberg]

Dirk, 

Thank you for your reply. It was thoughtful, sincere and above and beyond what was necessary. My last post was directed as a reply to the comment by someone else to take it up with the manufacture and not at any of yours.  I have no reason to question or doubt your telling of events and certainly don't want to weigh in on a matter that I was not "in the room" for. It sucks that is was not even the manufacture of the product that has soured this and will prevent it and all other identical computers manufactured by the OEM to be supported, but they did and I think your reasons are valid. Again, I think you are well within your right to make the choices you think are right for whatever reason you have. I have the utmost respect for you making them, explaining them, and standing by them. In this increasingly crazy world we need to stand for what we believe. 

Thanks again I'm glad you kept developing and working on Subsurface.

As a side note my shearwater works great with the platform. 

Happy and safe diving!