Eight years ago staff and students at Goldsmiths College at the University of London had a problem. They needed a way to easily and securely access their network file space remotely. It had to be secure, of course, and simple in order to minimize support overhead, and it had to work for both Windows and Mac clients. FTP and SSH were inappropriate for many in the community, who, developer Martin Wellard says, “had difficulty using a mouse. I figured that someone, somewhere, must have had this problem and written a simple little web front end for FTP that could be put on an SSL/TLS-enabled server.” The software he found was old and flaky, but had potential. “I decided to hack it into shape,” and that’s how Oliver was born.
“Once we made it live, it was wildly popular with the staff and students,” Wellard recalls. “I was surprised; all it was doing was abstracting FTP. I thought it would be nice to put it out on the Web so other sysadmins who had the same problem might find it useful. I put it up on my website, created a freshmeat entry, and forgot about it.
“Over time bugs came to light, which I fixed, and enhancements were requested, which I made. Initially the reports and requests came from staff and students, but an increasing number came from strangers, together with unsolicited language translation files which I incorporated into the code. Also came patches. One contributor was so prolific I decided to move the project to SourceForge so that he could post directly.”
But when Wellard left his system administration job at the university to become a full-time developer, he let Oliver languish. “I had no need to maintain it anymore, and I had many other projects that were higher up the priority list. Every time I received a bug report or question, I felt a tinge of guilt when I failed to answer after several weeks of putting it off. This feeling was mitigated by the knowledge that Oliver was simple, aging, and would surely be eclipsed by technological developments. The letters will stop coming soon, I thought, as people turn to better products.
“Eight years later, the emails still came in. Every time I received one I resolved to make a clean start and fix Oliver properly – soon.
“Earlier this year I received an email that shook me into action. A guy asked me if he could pay for my development time. I didn’t want to get paid for tinkering with Oliver, but the idea that in 2010 someone wanted it so badly they would be willing to pay really astonished me. So we agreed that rather than pay me, he would regularly hassle me, test what I produced, and send me bug reports. It was a great arrangement and he was rigorous with his testing. A month or two later he was happy enough to send Oliver out to his clients and I was feeling a lot less guilty. It also rekindled my interest in the idea and there’s now a great big list of things I’d like to add.”