I'd have expected that as time went on my programs would become more and more generally usable by a lot of people. But instead it sometimes seems that I started with the big generally applicable stuff like debhelper and have been filling in corners a bit since. While I have no shortage of users of my recent code, I also have a suprising number of programs like flashybrid that have naturally limited user bases.

Flashybrid has had three users that I know of over its lifetime, I suspect one user failed to get it to work, and at least one of them (me) has stopped using it. I don't mind that, since at the least, flashybrid let me do something really neat: Embed a usable Debian system on a 32 mb compact flash memory card, and let me spin up a disk every month or so to get at the rest of the system and upgrade and maintain it. This was the basis for my embedded home server for years, and it was plenty of reason to write the code, and once it was written, there was no real reason not to distribute it. Lack of users doesn't matter from that perspective.

On the other hand, I now look at flashybrid as a first try at embedding Debian in a particular way that I do think has potentially a lot of users, if the technology to do it can be worked out. The hardware is there: Sub-$100 wireless access points. These systems can run Debian if it's set up right. So I'm going to keep on with that.

Also interestingly, years after writing flashybrid I ended up working for a company that uses vaguely similar techniques to embed Debian. Which, starting Monday, it's my job to maintain and develop further. Interesting possibilities for convergence there..

Which if nothing else certainly points out that taking the extra couple of hours to take a program like flashybrid beyond a local hack, and making a proper release of it, can tend to pay off in unexpected ways.

Next: ten years of free software -- part 20 satutils