Maintainer Wanted

I assume that most of you have been expecting this letter for a long
time.  It is well overdue, by at least 12 months.  For those of you who
have stuck around that long, I apologize and say thank you.

The delay in getting this letter out is due, in part, to me flat out not
being honest with myself.  I always had the intention of spending way
more time on my open source projects, but as you well know, that just
never happened.

Over the last year, I have not really done much with any of my software
projects.  As I look into the future, I don't see that changing much at
all.  Hence, this belated letter.

I very much want to see these projects continue on, and actually need
them to.  The company that I work for uses a lot of them, and we will be
needing new features as we enhance our products.  This means that I will
continue to work on some of these projects, but for the most part, it
will mainly consist of small feature patches.

What I am hoping is that someone reading this letter will want to take
over the project.  Someone that wants to control the direction of the
project, maintain what exists, provide a new home for it, and accept
random patches from me :)

One thing that I have wanted to do for a long time is to transform these
projects from something that I fully control to something that is more
organic and controlled by more than one person.  So if you don't
necessarily want to take on everything required, maybe there is a small
piece that you are willing to take over.  Please speak up and we might
end up with enough people to form a team to take over the project.

The alternative, is that the project completely dies.  My plan is to try
to coordinate the transition of theses projects from me to someone else
by the end of January 2005.  If, at that time, no one has stepped up to
the plate, the project will completely die.

In the case of software that my company is using, I will bring that
software in house, and it will become closed-source :(  This is because
I just don't have the time or desire to maintain the website, releases,
bug tracker, etc.

Again, I apologize that it has taken me so long to come to this
conclusion.  I hope that these projects can become as active as they
were a year ago.

As a closing note, I wanted to thank everyone who is on this mailing
list.  The ideas and patches that have flowed from it have stimulated
this community where the releases haven't been able to.  Thanks for
sticking around, even when things have seems to die off.

Sincerely,

-- 
Peter Jones [unix;vi;c++;4wd] (http://pmade.org)
Open Source Software (http://pmade.org/software)