Hello All, I've been silent from the list for the past couple weeks, but that doesn't mean I haven't been scheming. I'm writing to let you all know of my current plans for Inline and my life. At the beginning of June, I decided to leave ActiveState and dedicate my time to working on Inline and other projects that help Perl. While I think that ActiveState is an excellent company and is working on beneficial products, I am personally more interested in working directly for the good of Perl and the Open Source community. In the next several months I plan to dedicate my time to working on the many Inline related projects that I've dreamt up in the last year, I also plan to spend time working on two other projects: NAPC and YAML. NAPC is a project for improving many of the current setbacks of the CPAN infrastrucure. YAML is a data serialization markup, that combines many of the benefits of XML with a simple, easy to read format that maps extremely well to the data types of Perl, Python, PHP, etc. (See http://www.yaml.org) All three of these projects are actually inter-related in various ways. Starting this weekend I am embarking on a three week speaking/hacking trip. On Sunday, I leave for The O'Reilly Open Source Conference in San Diego. I will be presenting a half day tutorial on programming with Inline::C, a general presentation on all the Inline projects, and a BOF session on YAML. The following Saturday, I'll be flying off to London, giving an Inline talk to the London.pm Perl Mongers, and then making my way to Amsterdam for the YAPC::Europe conference. I'll spend my time enjoying the company of Europe's best Perl hackers and giving "Yet Another" Inline Talk. For the remaining part of my three weeks, I hope to get together with the people I meet in Europe, and get some good projects going. After that, I will return to Vancouver and hack, hack, hack. In addition to my own mischief, I really want to work more closely with the Inline community and help kickstart some of the great ideas you've put into my brain. Of course, I will also need to figure out how to make a living doing all this. The avenues I am interested in pursuing include: + Corporate training in Inline related technologies + Short term contracts to help companies deploy Inline based projects + Corporate funding for starting new large scale projects - Inline::Cobol, etc - Must be released into the public domain + Writing a book about extending Perl with Inline + Teaching at Perl conferences + Donations :) I will also consider doing general Open Source based contract work if at least half of the code goes back into the public domain. If you work for a company that benefits from using Perl and especially Inline.pm, please consider asking them to hire my services. Furthermore, if you know of any related opportunities not listed above, please let me know. --- For the record, let me emphasize that I am not going to turn Inline into a closed source project, and try to use its popularity to make my fortune. That would never work. I will continue to support Inline in an open manner and you can expect its progress to accelerate. I'm merely looking for ways to make an honest living doing what I love to do. Finally, I'd like to give a big thanks to everybody who has supported my efforts over this past year. It really has been a pleasure. My decision to work for the benefit of Perl is actually based on a very selfish motive. I want to help ensure the preservation of its community; the people I consider my family. I honestly believe that. Cheers, Brian
