Earlier on today, the main
Blastwave website got replaced by this message :
Blastwave is a registered trademark of Blastwave.org Inc. in the
United States and Canada. All assets of Blastwave.org Inc. are frozen
until further notice. All Solaris(tm) related open source software
work and services are cancelled. All websites, documents and binary
software packages that bear the mark Blastwave or Blastwave(tm) are no
longer available until further notice.
At the same time, mailing lists, shell logins and other services seem to have been shutdown and/or removed from DNS. None of this came with any warning or notification to the maintainers, and I still don't know what's going on. I can't access any of the build servers, so it's fairly safe to assume that my build scripts, packages, documentation, and everything else I've been working on for the Solaris community over the last 5 years is gone also. As if that wasn't enough, there are also reports that someone has been
attempting to sabotage various mirror sites. I don't know how to take that - but frankly, right now, I don't care. I'm out. I've had it with the political fighting and drama. Many maintainers had already left following the last spat - I simply don't have the will to get involved in it any more, the damage has already been done. If anyone is still using my Blastwave packages (PostgreSQL, Nessus, PHP4, and some others) I recommend you switch to something else, like Sun's own
CoolStack or
OpenSolaris.
There's plenty more I could say, but at this point I think it's perhaps better to simply leave it. It's a sad day for me: seeing years of work towards something that I believed in, and helped a great many people, all go to ruin. It's even sadder for the Solaris community as a whole; this was a true grass-roots organisation - made up from like-minded Solaris users, admins, programmers and fans - who gave up countless hours of their own time to help others. I think the least we deserve is an explanation, but somehow I don't think one at this stage would make any difference anyway.
Update : People have been mailing me to say the main page is back up - true, but it's a case of "the lights are on, but no one's home". Check the thread in comp.unix.solaris.
Friday, August 8. 2008 at 17:46 (Reply)
Monday, August 11. 2008 at 11:21 (Reply)
It's definitely not back up.
Wednesday, August 27. 2008 at 13:26 (Reply)
I have question to you. We use your packages (mod_php) from Blastwave. But we need dbase compiled in it. Can I get source of this solaris package from you? I want try compile dbase support in it. Can you help me even if Blastwave build stack is down?
Wednesday, August 27. 2008 at 13:39 (Reply)
However, if you grab the PHP source it looks like adding dBase support is pretty simple : http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/dbase.installation.php
Thursday, September 11. 2008 at 16:28 (Link) (Reply)
it is sitting there .. never moved.
# grep "^mark" /etc/passwd
mark:x:16434:101:Mark Round:/export/home/mark:/bin/ksh
What you were caught in was me trying to stop the total lift of everything out of Blastwave by three people that simply announced they were suddenly up and running somewhere else with everythign they could carry.
Friday, October 10. 2008 at 18:18 (Reply)
*wave to Mark*.
It's amazing, how Dennis thinks that he somehow "owns" all the CSW software. When he never even ran it in the first place, but only "supported" it, as a supposed altruistic benefactor.
For other folks who may come across this site, the following URL gives a more accurate view of what happened recently.
http://www.opencsw.org/history
And if you have doubts, I reckon that Mark himself here, could verify information on the above URL as true.