[ros-dev] Time for another change

[Steven Edwards]

Hi All,
I have decided to step down as Project Coordinator and would like to
nominate Aleksey Bragin (Fireball) to run things in the interim until
a new one is officially elected. At this time I cannot contribute the
amount of effort needed to run the project during the audit and have
many things going on as well. Fireball, Ged, GreatLord, Art and others
have been doing a good job getting things on track and I think that
given the current state of things we are going in the right direction.
I am just no longer in a position to provide the kind of leadership
needed. Aleksey has been doing a great job, getting the new SVN up,
providing general direction and helping to resolve issues that have
been coming up. He has also been working to establish a Foundation for
the project in Russia and I think it would be best to move our legal
and financial operations there. He will be setting up a donation
system and I will be transfering the existing funds to him as well as
filing the paperwork needed to shutdown US operations.

I do not have the time required to try to continue to support the idea
of a US Foundation at this point and I am not sure I believe we need
it at this point. When I had the idea initially it was my hope that
our progress would be much more rapid and our amount of donations and
support from outside the project would be much higher.

At this point I view my efforts on the project as being a successful
failure. My ultimate goal when joining was to help make a Windows
replacement/clone (call it what you will) and to see it be widely
used. In saying that I believe it must be feature complete and
dependable, both of which have not been meet yet. I believe they will
be at some point but not during my time of being really active.

In trying to reach that ultimate goal I have some short and long terms
plans, most of which have been a success:

US Foundation - (Failure) Goal help raise awareness of the project and
provide assistance and legal representation to developers on the
project. We have a good relationship with the Software Freedom Law
Center and they have been kind enough to offer us advice however in
terms of real legal help given the current state of the project thats
not going to happen any time soon.

Wine Cooperation - (Success) We share quite a lot of code with the
Wine project and although it is hard as hell to get code in to Wine it
has generally been a positive experience. The Wine tree contains
hundreds if not thousands of minor fixes and features contributed by
developers who have worked on both projects. Certain applications such
as Taskmgr and Regedit were re-licensed by us and have been merged in
to the Wine tree.

Samba Cooperation - (Success) We have not fully ported samba however
we have established a very positive relationship with the Samba and
Samba-Tng developers and they seem very open to the idea of porting
Samba to Windows so that in the future when ReactOS is ready it will
provide a drop in solution. Elrond from Samba-tng has provided quite a
bit of help and ported most of Samba-Tng to Windows already.

Raising Awareness about ReactOS - (Success) When I joined no one had
heard of us. Now almost any technical gathering I go to, 50 to 90% of
the people attending are aware of our work. The GNU, Linux and BSD
developers have for the most part changed their attitude regarding our
project, its goals and future.

Other uses of ReactOS - (Success) This has been the most surprising to
me to watch. While we have not reached the ultimate goal we have seen
fruits of our labor. The NDISWrapper teams come to us for questions
which allows many Linux and BSD users to run Windows network card
drivers. The CaptiveNTFS project created a more effective method of
getting data from NTFS on to Linux. Many of the tools we have
developed and ported are now being used in all sorts of places such as
the FreeDOS port of command.com we reimplemented as cmd.exe has been
ported to WinCE/PowerPC. Besides helping the NDISWrapper and Wine
teams from time to time we are more and more becoming a source of
information for educational purposes.

So with all of that being said I am not planning on totally leaving
however I mainly plan to help write regression tests for Wine in my
spare time and hope that it helps ReactOS. I'm happy to help talk to
people on behalf of the project and to help promote it in anyway I
can. I think the next major thing I am going to try to do is visit
Russia during a conference to meet with Fireball again and I am
willing to continue to help mediate issues with Wine that may pop up.
I still plan on hanging on IRC and the mailing list however I don't
know how closely I will follow the list so if you need something email
me directly.

Thanks

--
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo