> gpsd is a service daemon that monitors a GPS attached to a serial or USB port, decodes the position/velocity/time information it sends, and republishes in a simple uniform format on an IANA-designated TCP/IP port. This enables multiple applications to read from a GPS without contention. The distribution also provides C and Python libraries to encapsulate the client side of talking with gpsd.
> Eric S. Raymond has been the technical lead of GPSD, a close peer project of NTP and one of its principal time sources, since 2004. GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.
The top item, where he's also the technical lead:
> NTPsec
> A stripped down-security-hardened and generally improved version of the NTP reference code. Features code bulk reduced by a factor of 4, better monitoring and diagnostic tools, and Network Time Security.
Aspires to become one, but it's early in the process to see if it'll succeed.
Those are projects I've vaguely followed over the years. Reading down the list, this claims to be one, and the claim is partially falsifiable:
> giflib
> The ubiquitous service library for rendering GIFs. I handed off the project 1994 to avoid problems with the U.S. patent system, but accepted back the lead in 2012. This code had the odd effect of making me virtually omnipresent; it seems nobody has ever bothered to write a replacement, and it's now ubiquitous in web browsers, cellphones and gaming consoles. In a nicely ironic touch, it earned me an appearance in the credits of the Microsoft XBox.
GPSD was historically an important project, but I wouldn't call it "load bearing" in the same sense as core networking or service contributions.
It's also increasingly less important as the changes dropped in 4.19 are picked up by downstream software authors. Most software installations that care about gps are deployed in SBC configurations. A lot of other folks (e.g., hobbyists with external microcontrollers or arm SBCs) are parsing directly.
Folks most interested in linux attached hardware are either older school hardware hackers (who rely on this project) or folks using new LoRa radios (in which case that stuff is in the card and annoyingly locked down because it's part of some LoRa monetization schemes).
Sooooo yes. Not a bullshit project. But no, not a ILBS project.
I'll repeat the claim from the NTPsec project page:
> GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.
And tools, to support for example the development of tools like Emacs and GCC, indirectly support "core networking or services".
You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.
Having hand built and written software for a lot of drones, gpsd is not mission critical in most drones and I dunno where they get that claim.
You only use gpsd for embedded hardware when you have no drivers OR you're in 2017.
As for Android... again that capability is not important to the internet. It's important to Google cheaply getting a feature launched. This seems to me to be specifically ignoring the anti-corporate-centric intent of ESR's post to elevate his importance.
This essay is important without these sub-discussions. I fully agree with ESR that capitalism fails to sustain the internet and ruthlessly rides the backs of maybe four dozen skilled individuals in the world who, when they're gone, will be sorely missed and the world will suddenly become more expensive if others don't take up the call.
I just don't think ESR is in that critical group. He might be in a group of people writing widely used software. And that's great and important. But it really doesn't seem like what he himself is discussing.
> You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.
Both of whom are well compensated for their work, no? Seems to me like we should look more critically at who is not being served by capitalism and help them since their work has value.
Raymond didn't write gpsd, did he? He took it over as the "maintainer". But as 'geofft observed awhile ago, if you actually git-log the project, you'll see that most of the substantive changes to gpsd aren't Raymond's.
Is it possible that what Raymond really has is a (waning) talent for getting his name attached to other people's work?
This is merely a list of the "critical Internet services or libraries" that he claims in one way or another, and ensuring the maintenance of such software is part of the whole thesis.
To scare quote that, and denigrate it over "substantive changes" ... well, I must thank for your solid support of his thesis.
I don't understand your objection. Either you do the work or you don't. There's no "critical Internet infrastructure" value in simply attaching your name to things.
Here you're blatantly accusing ESR of fraud, which per you "requires an active intent to acquire something of value through misrepresentation", to wit, soliciting money for "attaching his name to things".
We have no basis for a discussion of the work you claim he's not doing.
I don't know where you're going with this, you haven't given me anything to reply to here, and so I suppose I'll simply stand by what I wrote. I am certainly not accusing anyone of committing a crime.
> gpsd
> gpsd is a service daemon that monitors a GPS attached to a serial or USB port, decodes the position/velocity/time information it sends, and republishes in a simple uniform format on an IANA-designated TCP/IP port. This enables multiple applications to read from a GPS without contention. The distribution also provides C and Python libraries to encapsulate the client side of talking with gpsd.
From the core team page on the following project (https://ntpsec.org/core-team.html), with at least one falsifiable claim:
> Eric S. Raymond has been the technical lead of GPSD, a close peer project of NTP and one of its principal time sources, since 2004. GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.
The top item, where he's also the technical lead:
> NTPsec
> A stripped down-security-hardened and generally improved version of the NTP reference code. Features code bulk reduced by a factor of 4, better monitoring and diagnostic tools, and Network Time Security.
Aspires to become one, but it's early in the process to see if it'll succeed.
Those are projects I've vaguely followed over the years. Reading down the list, this claims to be one, and the claim is partially falsifiable:
> giflib
> The ubiquitous service library for rendering GIFs. I handed off the project 1994 to avoid problems with the U.S. patent system, but accepted back the lead in 2012. This code had the odd effect of making me virtually omnipresent; it seems nobody has ever bothered to write a replacement, and it's now ubiquitous in web browsers, cellphones and gaming consoles. In a nicely ironic touch, it earned me an appearance in the credits of the Microsoft XBox.