Simplewall Has Been Discontinued
62 comments
·February 22, 2025no_wizard
gwerbret
There's an important discussion in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead, so I thought I would comment on it here instead. I suspect teddyh is being criticized for use of the word "obligation", so maybe I can clarify.
People can create and operate channels on YouTube for free. Yet we frequently see reports of Google acting unreasonably towards people who come to depend on YouTube, often for their livelihood. We expect Google to act morally by providing the bare minimum of human oversight when a person's channel has been banned by an AI mistake. But there is no legal or ethical obligation, because YouTube is "free", and Google just doesn't care enough about morals.
We also see lots of examples of FOSS authors getting burned out when their sense of morality is used and abused by users. That's also not okay. But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium where the "norm" assumes people can be reasonable, mature adults. No one wins when we optimize for the outliers.
teddyh
Exactly, yes. Thank you. I have explicitly, every time I mentioned the word, been referring to a social obligation, i.e. specifically not a legal one.
> But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium
Unfortunately, there is a vicious cycle leading to extreme attitudes from both sides, which I described in the second half of this comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38310514>
shagie
> ... in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile.
> If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it. Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. When enough users do this, the post is restored. There's a small karma threshold before vouch links appear.
I'm not sure if your karma is sufficient for that action, but it's not a dead comment anymore.
gwerbret
Yes I see that now, thanks!
nijave
Youtube the relationship is largely bidirectional where both sides are profiting
FOSS often times consumers are profiting and maintainers are not (and many times maintainers are investing/spending instead)
teddyh
> Creators / maintainers owe us nothing
I would argue that they do, in fact, owe us something.
All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public, until such time as they publicly announce its end. A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. If they don’t, or suddenly stop, they have abandoned the social etiquette of a conversation. This is not the public “being entitled” (as some like to claim), but is instead the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules.
(I should not need to say this, but in addition to being a user of many software projects, I am myself a maintainer of software publicly available – in official Linux distributions, even. I do not think that I ask my fellow maintainers for much – only a smidgen of respect for their users.)
(Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287>)
baq
The tax you’re describing is exactly why maintainers burn out and why open source projects die, or worse - they’re never born. The only way to win is not to play.
belorn
It is very similar to club activities and volunteer work. People burn out fast when they stop finding value in the work. It is exceptional common with instructors where say parents pay to a club for their children membership, where the parents might not be fully aware that the cost of operation would be significant higher if the people involved were paid employees rather than people volunteering their time. One has to regularly remind people about the social aspects that are the foundation of such activity, and that the activity can only exist when enough people join in and help. When that fails you get very high burnout rates which quickly can cause a death spiral of the whole activity.
Normally such activity comes with one year commitments. Leaving in the middle of things unannounced and without warning would be breaking the social etiquette. No one is forced to work but there are social expectations and obligations in social activities. How much open source project is similar to such activity, and how much social expectation there are will depend on the context. For example, if you are volunteering as treasurer to a large open source project, the expectations are going to be very similar to that of a club, as will the burn out if the person doing the work don't get value from it.
evanelias
> All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public
No, they're not. Unlike a conversation, a public announcement is a one-way, one-to-many communication.
> A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns.
In a social setting, with a limited number of participants, sure. But in an internet forum, with an unlimited number of participants, people fail to make reasonable attempts to respond to the entirety of others' comments on a fairly regular basis. And there is absolutely no widespread social obligation otherwise.
But this is all entirely irrelevant anyway, because a software project is not the same thing as a conversation in the first place:
> the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules.
Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations.
teddyh
> respond to the entirety of others' comments
You are mischaracterizing what I wrote. I did not say the entirety of others’s comments; I explicitly wrote only “make reasonable attempts”.
> Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations.
Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation I described in the second paragraph here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310060>.
null
henning
The social etiquette is set by the license the code is distributed under, which says things like "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE" in all caps.
That social etiquette indicates that maintainers don't owe you shit.
teddyh
That’s the legal warranty disclaimer. It has nothing to do with support, security fixes, or future development, and certainly does not speak about simply being reasonably responsive when being contacted by users.
Also, and this might be hard for overly rules-obsessed people to understand, this is not a legal matter. It is a matter of social etiquette. I of course agree that nobody is legally owed anything. But this is not about legality.
BrenBarn
That's not the social etiquette, that's the legal situation.
brudgers
A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns.
Slaves and servants and subjects have the obligation you describe.
It is the nature of their bondage.
Asking questions and complaining and unsolicited opining are hallmarks privilege.
To the extent a social contract is a contract, it requires both parties to receive consideration.
teddyh
Comparing mainainers being socially obligated to respond to questions to actual slavery, is unseemly.
If people don’t want the social burden of being a public person or even the relatively small burden of having a public project, they have the option of not being public.
hinkley
I think a lot of open source maintainers start before they have found their favorite languages. And now you have a problem if you see that the language you wrote your library in creates a bunch of make-work problems that you can solve by switching languages. How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good?
If he keeps pushing commits, I won’t place bets but would say don’t be surprised if they’re in a new language.
teddyh
> How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good?
I would think it’s fairly simple. Announce your retirement from the project, and assign the project leadership and commit rights (or whatever GitHub uses) to whoever you feel would be a good fit, or the most frequent contributor, or simply to the most recent one. But most anything would be better than locking the repository and vanishing without a word.
fra
I think this is the reason in fewer 0.01% of cases. Languages are not in the top 10 things that make being an open source maintainer difficult.
mmaunder
Agreed. Sometimes it’s personal challenges or tragedy. So perhaps best to let it lie if it’s not volunteered.
ementally
FOSS alternative is Fort https://github.com/tnodir/fort
But unfortunately you have to disable core isolation for the time being https://github.com/tnodir/fort/discussions/108
baal80spam
Thanks for mentioning Fort. I've never heard of it but I'm an avid user of Simplewall. Looks like I will need to take a close look now. Thank God it's not another crapp written in Electron.
aucisson_masque
I would recommend Fort, back when i ran windows i tried all the available firewall and simplewall ended up being buggy after some times.
Fort worked perfectly, it had more settings and once you took the time to set it up you could just save the rules, the configuration and export it to another computer.
BoingBoomTschak
Used https://tinywall.pados.hu/ when I was on Windows (at least a decade ago).
9cb14c1ec0
Windows Filtering Platform (what Simplewall is based on) is simultaneously one of the most powerful network access management APIs that exist, and also the most frustrating to use. The way it works in practice doesn't always match the documentation.
greggsy
I wonder if there is change afoot in the way those APIs are designed and interacted with?
MS did indicate during the CrowdStrike DOS that they would work towards opening up or at least documenting those APIs and some other aspects of the kernel to help improve the situation for vendors.
I believe there might have also been antitrust concerns about the way they deliver Defender as part of the OS, but simultaneously offer premium cloud platforms? Don’t recall the full story.
qingcharles
What's the simplest/best tool to just nix all the Windows/MS telemetry crap?
I'm already running Tiny11 + Win11Debloat, which removes some of it.
ClickedUp
Blackbird V6
Sarky
Love this litle app. Author did this once before. I hope he changes his mind.
I would hate to need to look for a replacement.
immibis
Since it's open source, the replacement is to keep this software up-to-date yourself.
andro_dev
I recommend https://github.com/pylorak/TinyWall as a simpler firewall management alternative.
baal80spam
Is the archiving of its repo the only "proof" of it being discontinued?
baq
Do you need more? Is the hardest proof you can get
snailmailstare
It might be the hardest proof to expect, but there is an unarchive button and people archive for reasons like moving rather than stopping a project permanently.
UltraSane
What is wrong with the Standard Windows Firewall? It is quite powerful.
Cartoxy
the UI is garbage. Talk about unintuitive. Where it's simple it to simple and when it's advanced it's not intuitive and the relvant info is scatterd to the point of disfunction.
uncletammy
You can't block Windows/Microsoft traffic
UltraSane
You can block any traffic by IP or process
neuroelectron
I'm guessing it has a lot of undocumented features and doesn't behave as expected.
Creators / maintainers owe us nothing, but I am always slightly bummed when I don't see a reason for the discontinuation.
Can speculate all day of course, and any reason is a good one. Again, I know they don't owe us anything, even an explanation, but curiosity always gets the best of me.