Dear all, the last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind.
Shad has sadly advised that he needs to step back from Koozali SME due to overwhelming commitments. In the first instance I would like to say what a huge loss this is for us. Shad has been the mainstay of the distro for longer than most of us care to remember, and without his tireless work and support it may well not have survived. I am sure you will join me in extending our heartfelt thanks for all his work over the years, and good wishes for the future. In light of this, Shad felt that the best way forward for the distro would be to move to our own independent hosting. As a result, Daniel and Jean Philippe have been working feverishly with Shad on this over the last few months, and we are pleased to say we have now moved from the existing infrastructure at Clear to our own servers. We will be maintaining the wiki, forums, bug tracker etc in their current form. Once the move is completed and all services are stable we will start planning a migration to a Koozali branded website. There may be teething problems e.g. currently the wiki is not right currently. Please let us know if you spot anything not working correctly. At the same time Ian Wells has also had to step down from the Board due to work commitments. This is another huge blow for us. Ian has also been a loyal supporter of the distro for a very long time, and without his phenomenal work we would never have got Koozali SME v9 out. A true inspiration for others to follow. Along with Shad he stood as a founding member of Koozali Foundation and I hope that the Foundation can live up to the high standards that they have both set. I am sure I speak for all the community when I thank them both for all their efforts over the years and wish them both well for the future. We now need others who will follow their lead and step up to the plate. This serves as a salient reminder that none of this happens without a huge amount of work from a small group of unsung heroes. They do this freely, in their own time. They really need your help. Open Source is not a one way street - it needs people to give back in one way or another, be it with a financial donation to help pay for the infrastructure, or with your time. http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Volunteering If you want fixes released more quickly, then help find/triage/fix/verify a bug. If you want new toys for your server, help with contribs. You don't have to be able to code to verify bugs, and we'll help you. Help on the Wiki. There are masses of pages that need work, be that spell checking, formatting or even creating. A great place to learn more as well. Or hangout on the forums regularly and try to help others. Whatever you do, do something. However small it may be. If you want to help, then do please contact us either by joining on the devlist http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/listinfo/ or catch some of us on IRC at freenode #SME_Server. Or make a donation here : http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?action=profile;area=subscriptions or follow the 'Donate' Link from the main page of the wiki. Once again, I personally want to thank Shad and Ian for all their work over the years, and their help and support with the creation of the Koozali SME Server Foundation. They will be sorely missed, but I do hope that they keep a passing interest in the distribution. B. Rgds John Crisp President, Koozali Foundation _______________________________________________ Discussion about project organisation and overall direction To unsubscribe, e-mail discussion-unsubscr...@lists.contribs.org Searchable archive at http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/public/discussion/
