Forum OpenACS Q&A: Resignation

I am sorry to announce my departure from the OCT as the recent weeks have proven that despite my best efforts I am unable to attend the meetings and do not have the time anymore to contribute to the toolkit in a fashion that is acceptable to some members of the community.

Therefore, to save precious time and not get pissed off so often, I decided it is best for me to leave and focus on helping others to learn and work with the toolkit instead of trying to improve the core unless hired to do so. Either way all code which I can get my hands on will be made publicly available and announced (if permitted by the customers) so other interested parties can take the patches and work off them, saving on double development.

I realized it is best for me and my customers if I continue to focus on their benefits and making a good solution for them. In the past I was trying too hard to make generalizations work where they have not been asked for. And contributing these enhancements back is a time consuming process, which usually has to happen in your spare time.

It has been a pleasure to serve in the OCT the last couple of years and despite the occasional hickups it has been great to see the project progressing. There exists a lot of opportunities for the toolkit, .LRN and ]po[ being some of them, but also in the non educational research world lot of projects can gain from using OpenACS, so take a look at those and embrace them if time permits.

I would only wish the collaboration between the OpenACS companies and organizations was better, but from personal experience I can say that I fully understand why it does not happen that extensively. Same is true for contributing back to the toolkit, as the rules around that are difficult to follow and put some high burden on the contributor (though these rules are a good reason why the toolkit is as stable as it is...).

For those of you who are using ]po[ I hope to be able to contribute to that cause more time, now that I am "freed" from personal obligation to work on OpenACS proper. The first thing will be for me to make sure that 5.4, however it will shape out to be, becomes a basis for one of the future ]po[ releases. Though don't expect miracles, as training new developers in OpenACS and ]po[ development does have a higher priority (not to mention serving customers 😊 ).