Hi all. I first became involved with LinuxCNC in 2004, and it remains the Free Software project to which I've made the largest contribution. However, I haven't been very involved with the development or use of LinuxCNC for years---in fact, looking back at my blog, it has been almost 9 years since I last did anything on my little CNC router worth mentioning.
During my time as a more active developer, I often positioned myself as a gatekeeper. At the time I believed that by exercising control over what went in to LinuxCNC, I was preserving the software from harm. More important than whether any of those individual decisions was right or wrong, I now worry that I have contributed to a bad culture in LinuxCNC that drove away contributors. It has been said that the Internet is founded on "rough consensus and running code". Today, I think that LinuxCNC could benefit from more of this attitude and less of my "gate-keeping" style of dealing with contributions. For these reasons, I have decided that it's time to make it official: I'm taking myself out of the loop of LinuxCNC, particularly and most importantly as it comes to making decisions about pull requests. As far as any administrative privileges I have (github, website, IRC, sourceforge(!), etc): I'll turn in my keys to any of those on request, as long as that leaves at least two people who will keep that service going to the benefit of LinuxCNC developers and users. In the meantime, I don't mind keeping the forum software and its OS up to date as I have been doing. A number of you are really good friends. I'd like to keep it that way. I plan to keep hanging out in #linuxcnc-devel and I'll try to provide my "wisdom" if it's requested. Please use the remainder of this thread to reminisce about the good times. For instance, I fondly remember two events in particular from the CNC Workshops I attended in Galesburg: 1) We're all sitting at the pizza place, and Jon Elson and John Kasunich are both trying to out-do the other with stories about mishaps with power electronics. I've still got nothing on even the tamest of their tales. 2) While running the Mazak, I discover that hitting alt-tab makes rtapi freeze up for a few milliseconds while the screen redraws, leading to an audible "BAM!" from the mill. Instead of exercising common sense and not doing *that* again, I held down alt-tab to make it go "BAM BAM BAM BAM" until someone ran up to hit estop. (the fix was replacing the video card, I think I recall) You shouldn't leave a newbie in charge of a big machine like that, even for a moment! I wish you all, and the project itself, the best. Jeff ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
