(repost - I think the first one didn't get through) Hi all,
It has taken some time to get the paperwork sorted out, but a few days ago I got news that my apache.org account has been setup. My warm thanks to all voters - I will do my best to live up to your support! Thanks also to Gianugo Rabellino for making the initial contacts, to Stefano Mazzocchi for leading the "negociations" and to Arved Sandstrom for his support in the process. Last but not least, thanks to the jfor contributors which helped make it good enough to be noticed: mainly Andreas Putz and Chris Scott, the complete list is at www.jfor.org. (Now take a deep breath - "briefly" is just to keep you awake ;-) To briefly introduce myself, I live in Switzerland (french-speaking part, near Lausanne, nice place) where I work as an independent consultant, mostly for government agencies in Bern (german part) and do some teaching in software engineering at EPFL, a well-known engineering school. I've been living here all my life except for one year in California, having a great time in the drums class of Musicians Institute in Hollywood. I will turn 40 in a few months and I have a nice family, meaning computing is not everything in my life - but still a very important part. For the last few years I've been doing mostly architecture, java programming (mainly application-specific frameworks reused by other programmers) and mentoring of programming teams. Most of my projects are seen as web sites by end users, with quite a lot of machinery behind the scenes to interface with legacy databases or dynamically publish data from various sources, today mostly XML-based. I'm also on the board of www.it-processing.ch, a young company that markets a dynamic publishing system used by parliaments to quickly publish meeting transcripts on the web, even while the meetings are still running. I strongly believe in Open-Source, mostly when a company is willing to fund development or extension of an Open-Source project as part of a business need. I have doubts about the "work at day, Open-Source at night" model because everyone needs to eat and have a life at some point, so my emphasis now is in convicing my customers to fund Open-Source projects instead of doing their own thing. This has worked nicely with jfor, the XSL-FO to RTF converter that we're now going to merge into FOP, where the initial development was funded by the Swiss Federal Chancellery as we needed RTF output for a project there. The acceptance of jfor, and the great contributions that we got from around the world have helped comforting them that Open Source is the way to go, so we are staying tuned for more such projects! I hope to be able to help make FOP a better product - the need is definitely here! -- Bertrand Delacr�taz, www.codeconsult.ch -- web technologies consultant - OO, Java, XML, C++ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
