Transmission ARM no longer free?

I must say that I share the same questions/feelings here with the poster. Of course GPL allows for modifying and selling GPL-covered software, but it just does not feel right. I have been involved with FOSS for years, mainly for Q&A and beta testing. Never charged anything, never will. Then again I do not have to pay the bills, but remember that the original transmission and the original rtorrent are free (or donate-ware) projects. And we are talking about projects made from the start, not some porting work...

Plus, pay per-upgrade? I really hope that someone ports a Debian/optware-like mechanism here. I am in envy of the v1 ReadyNAS models :(

If you want to develop your own apps or install Transmission for your own use via SSH you are free to do so but when you consider all the effort you'd need to go to do so, I'd argue the cheaper option would be to support the developer and buy the App.

Now WhoCares? (ReadyNASXtras) spends a lot of time developing his add-ons as does another developer super-poussin (in fact it looks like it's super-poussin who's posted a Genie App for Transmission).

There's a fair bit of work involved in doing things such as:
1. Compile add-on (this can take several hours, if not longer depending on which add-on is installed)
2. If compilation fails fix problem then go back to step 1
3. Test add-on to make sure it works on a range of different firmwares including testing to check that upgrades work smoothly.
4. If there's a problem found testing the add-on, fix the bug and go back to step 1 again

This is a time consuming process particularly for the slower devices (Sparc and to a lesser extent ARM) as compilation, testing etc. takes more time, not only because of the slower processors than x86 but also because of the work involved to get things to run properly. Add-ons depend on a range of other software which may be newer or older than what ships on the ReadyNAS so patching it to work on the ReadyNAS can be quite a bit of work.

You also need to note that the user base for running say Transmission on the ReadyNAS is going to be a lot lower than the userbase of Transmission overall. With the donation ratio being so poor it's not unreasonable for developers to sell their add-ons for a small fee. Without the fee there probably wouldn't be anywhere near as many add-ons available.

I should also note that plenty of people charge for works derived from software licensed under the GPL or other similar licenses. So long as it's clear (which it is) that they're using software licensed under the GPL or similar licenses it's fine.

Do note that on ARM, Genie Apps is the way things are going.

Thank you for taking the plunge and addressing my questions. I might sound a like a troll here, please trust me when I say I'm not; just trying to find out how I can make my new NAS provide the same things my 4+ years MSS offered, without an extra fee.

The majority of GPL development is for free. Although not illegal or unethical, I find that porting GPL apps for a fee is not of my taste, considering the huge development effort made by the, say, rtorrent maker, especially after receiving upstream bug reports for all rtorrent-running platforms out there. GPL itself was made to discourage selling derivative works, by including clauses to propagate the same terms to derivations of the derivatives...

As for the small size of the userbase here: a lot of other platforms are not that much larger, yet they have a large port/package selection for every purpose.

I'd better continue discussion on the other thread though, better stop hijacking the thread here :)

Well so far at least there's only been two prolific developers WhoCares? and super-poussin. Without them there'd be little in the way of community add-ons available. A lot of that open source stuff is designed to be installed on say a ubuntu system not a heavily customised Debian system like the ReadyNAS. With community add-ons typically being the work of one developer it's a lot of work.

Now both of the developers have produced add-ons with the option to donate in the past. Unfortunately due to low donation ratios, a small fee needs to be charged. Even so, the devs are giving away a lot of their time.

It's perfectly fine for add-on installers to be sold and both the prolific developers do make it clear that the original source for the software was developed by a third party and that GPL (or similarly licensed) code is used.

If you think you can justify the time and expense to develop some add-ons making them available for free then go for it. Sadly most developers have only developed a few add-ons and come and gone.

mdgm wrote:
If you think you can justify the time and expense to develop some add-ons making them available for free then go for it. Sadly most developers have only developed a few add-ons and come and gone.

Pity, the platform seems excellent for the purpose... What, in your opinion, might have caused the lack of creation of a critical mass for for-free development for these units? I do see architectural changes, ie sparc -> arm or significant changes in the same architecture (for example, changes from one hardware model to another, that break ABI compatibility) as a possible culprit. Something else perhaps?

Just doesn't stick, this is the first time I'm running into a case like this one, a good platform with a community lacking development interest...

Well you do need a number of units to develop for all three platforms and make sure add-ons will run on all units out there but you can of course choose just to develop for one platform and choose to work with others who have units on the other platforms.

There's been plenty of interest but lots of people may install some things for themselves (there's a long running thread on installing VirtualBox on the ReadyNAS Pro which has a fast CPU and runs that software well) but to make an add-on with a UI to enable/disable things does take some time. I can only conclude that not many in the community have been willing to put that amount of time into it.

One should also note that when a new firmware comes out sometimes that can require an add-on update regardless of whether the software itself has been updated e.g. when a new kernel is added an add-on that has kernel modules would need to be updated to work with the new kernel.

I see. In http://www.rnasguide.com/2011/12/10/readynas-duo-v2-a-beta-testers-review/ it is mentioned that:

Community add-ons NetGear provides a Software Development Kit that allows 3rd party add-ons to be developed to extend the ReadyNAS functionality.

Is this free and if so, any idea on where I could get it?

I wrote that review.

http://www.readynas.com/sdk is free. However there's a better also free version at https://gitorious.org/readynas/frontview-sdk

Genie App development is not free and going forward Genie Apps is the direction the Duo v2 is going. See https://developer.netgear.com

I read the first link but I there's a couple of issues here: First, this seems to be for v1 NAS boxes and not for v2s. Furthermore, and if I understand correctly, this is about creating a frontview-interacting app. What about actually creating the core app, the executable that is? Only through cross-compiling?