Hello everyone, With apologies to Lynyrd Skynyrd, I am not actually leaving tomorrow. Though I must unfortunately say I am in fact leaving Cobbler-land and Red Hat to persue other exciting ventures in the land of software that I am interested in. I'll be around on and off throughout the end of the month.
Folks, it has been an outstanding almost 4 years with Cobbler and everyone here. I hope you have had a lot of fun. Working with all of you online (and meeting folks at FudCONs, Tech Forums, BarCamps, and Summits) has been a fantastic experience that you just don't get most places. We've had people share Cobbler with LUGs and Conferences on multiple continents and even write magazine articles and chapters in books about us. Hundreds of folks have contributed ideas, code, testing, helped other users, helped market the project, and provided feedback. It is almost impossible to measure the userbase (since this is free software), but we know it is very very large and the world would most certainly implode without it (ok, perhaps not, but we can dream?). Everyone here on the mailing list helped make that possible by being a part of things. I can't say thanks to you enough. We've achieved a lot -- Now when someone starts a new Linux job, they don't have to write their own automation system -- they have one on the shelf that they know well, and maybe even helped build. Crazy complicated things like virtualization are hopefully simplified and annoying things like editing DHCP/DNS configurations and managing tons of repositories and kickstarts are hopefully made a lot faster and simpler. Folks have a simple place to store their deployment configuration that doesn't get in their way, and have lots of different ways to access it. As with many other open source management frameworks, we've shown that it's possible to collaborate across company boundaries and share infrastructure. This all can clearly carry on, and should also be the way more future projects like it are spawned and run ... by absorbing the good ideas of everyone in the user community, borrowing the features people have and like from their own in-house systems, and working with those users to build the software they want together. Collectively you are smarter than any one person or group, and that is why Cobbler works. The philosophy is very much "by sysadmins, for sysadmins" and is how we made sure Cobbler did the right thing and kept moving forward so fast. Except I am not really a sysadmin, I just play one on TV :) We have also shown, I hope, that simple software works, and there is a need for things that make things easy. We've kept our code simple on purpose -- to encourage any user to become a contributor. As time goes on, I expect things to get even more simpler and to see that contribution expand even farther. That is key to what we do. As I'm sure you are wondering, Cobbler will be left in good capable hands. It is being taken over by not one, but several folks -- including two frequent collaborators of mine -- Scott Henson and John Eckersberg from Red Hat IT. They'll be joined by Devan Goodwin (of Spacewalk/Satellite fame) and Alex Wood, also of Red Hat IT. They are all extremely sharp folks who care about Cobbler and community projects. We are meeting next week to get things transitioned over and put in proper gear -- and to figure out plans for future features and the 2.0.X and 2.2.X roadmaps. I'd call upon everyone here to be as awesome to them as they were to me, and continue to share the ideas you've had with them on this list and on places like #cobbler. Also, be sure to continue to help each other too, as you've been great at doing in the past. Again, thank you, and it has been an honor. Sincerely, Michael DeHaan ( contact info: michael.dehaan on gmail, http://michaeldehaan.net/ ) ==== Note 1 -- I'm not quite done yet, so I may still respond to a few more emails, bug reports and such :) Note 2 -- The official home of Cobbler remains at http://fedorahosted.org/cobbler and the source at git.fedorahosted.org. My personal github may not stay up to date (probably won't), so you if you have any external branches you might want to make sure they aren't forked off mine -- or otherwise that you frequently rebase off of git.fedorahosted.org. My copy will remain in place though. _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
