Bruno Lowagie
Fri, 16 May 2008 06:33:45 -0700
Fhomasp wrote: > My mailbox didn't get updated on new replies though, but hey. You're not subscribed to the mailing list; maybe that's why you didn't get the updates. > And again I am in your debt guys, thanks for the swift and concrete > information. And I've been having long days as well. So please don't get > worked up over me ;) Commuting to Brussels; train stations that catch fire; too much traffic on the highways;... It sucks the life out of a developer ;-) > Oh and I heard a few hours ago that Bruno Lowagie used to work where I'm > working now :) Not for a long time; having to go up and down to Brussels every day, being bodyshopped by a privately held company; those are two things that are very hard to combine with maintaining a F/OSS project. I didn't have any free time left to write a single line of iText code while I was working there. That was a shame. > Roughly translated "the Flemmish Agency for People with a Handicap" in > Brussels. In short: VLAFO. I really like to work for governmental institutions, and there was a very inspiring VLAFO project leader over there with a very interesting vision. However, I felt that the company in charge of the development at that time was making the wrong choices business wise (one of my colleagues used the term "not good busy" which is a nonsensical literal translation of "niet goed bezig"). What I felt was wrong, was that they were reinventing the wheel. They wrote beautiful generic software from scratch, but kept its source code closed! A few months after I left, I discovered that most of the stuff they had been working on was available for free in jBoss. I thought it wasn't wise to waste that many energy and resources (tax payers money; 'my' money) on software that would only be used by one organization, and of which the development would never benefit of the input by many different developers from all over the world. The company I worked for at that time could have been the leader of different OS projects, but once jBoss gained more ground, they were too late. They could as well throw away all their expensive code, replacing it with a free application server that already had all the generic features they had developed... So you could say I resigned for 'political' reasons; although I didn't say that out loud at that time, because I didn't want to hurt the business of the company that had been hiring me. I still like the owner of that company, because he's a very inspiring guy too; apart from the political differences towards F/OSS, I think we could have been good friends. But it doesn't matter that much anymore because his company was bought by another one, that has now been bought by... er... the company you are working for. I hope politics have changed since then, and that F/OSS developers are no longer frowned upon as was the case seven years ago ;-) Give my warmest regards to the people at VLAFO who still remember me! best regards, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Do you like iText? Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php Or leave a tip: https://tipit.to/itexttipjar