[ros-dev] Time for another change

[Aleksey Bragin]

	Hi,
thanks for the faith in me, I will do my best in order to get the  
project to the good future in the shortest possible time.

I have lots of plans - improve and advance the roadmap (I have nice  
ideas since I have some background in scheduling, planning and  
management, I will try to apply my knowledge here), finding  
commercial applications for reactos and its modules and subprojects,  
so the project will get some funding, collaboration with other  
projects - this is always important.

And of course as a developer I still have lots of interesting things  
to do too: continue the work on svn server's abilities (provide per- 
revision iso's, look into continuos integration systems in the future  
too), regression testing to ensure both compatibilty and stability  
too, ntoskrnl+bootloader changes and improvements in the boot phase,  
drivers of course, also i18n support is of a priority for me, and  
certainly auditing the source code.

Personally I have very much respect in Steven's actions as being the  
PC - in addition to what he stated in his email I want to add that he  
introduced periodical Status Reports, and some other interesting things.

I will keep and improve if possible the level of work Steven was doing.


With the best regards,
Aleksey Bragin.


On Mar 19, 2006, at 7:57 AM, Steven Edwards wrote:

> Hi All,
> I have decided to step down as Project Coordinator and would like to
> nominate Aleksey Bragin (Fireball) to run things in the interim until
> a new one is officially elected. At this time I cannot contribute the
> amount of effort needed to run the project during the audit and have
> many things going on as well. Fireball, Ged, GreatLord, Art and others
> have been doing a good job getting things on track and I think that
> given the current state of things we are going in the right direction.
> I am just no longer in a position to provide the kind of leadership
> needed. Aleksey has been doing a great job, getting the new SVN up,
> providing general direction and helping to resolve issues that have
> been coming up. He has also been working to establish a Foundation for
> the project in Russia and I think it would be best to move our legal
> and financial operations there. He will be setting up a donation
> system and I will be transfering the existing funds to him as well as
> filing the paperwork needed to shutdown US operations.
>
> I do not have the time required to try to continue to support the idea
> of a US Foundation at this point and I am not sure I believe we need
> it at this point. When I had the idea initially it was my hope that
> our progress would be much more rapid and our amount of donations and
> support from outside the project would be much higher.
>
> At this point I view my efforts on the project as being a successful
> failure. My ultimate goal when joining was to help make a Windows
> replacement/clone (call it what you will) and to see it be widely
> used. In saying that I believe it must be feature complete and
> dependable, both of which have not been meet yet. I believe they will
> be at some point but not during my time of being really active.
>
> In trying to reach that ultimate goal I have some short and long terms
> plans, most of which have been a success:
>
> US Foundation - (Failure) Goal help raise awareness of the project and
> provide assistance and legal representation to developers on the
> project. We have a good relationship with the Software Freedom Law
> Center and they have been kind enough to offer us advice however in
> terms of real legal help given the current state of the project thats
> not going to happen any time soon.
>
> Wine Cooperation - (Success) We share quite a lot of code with the
> Wine project and although it is hard as hell to get code in to Wine it
> has generally been a positive experience. The Wine tree contains
> hundreds if not thousands of minor fixes and features contributed by
> developers who have worked on both projects. Certain applications such
> as Taskmgr and Regedit were re-licensed by us and have been merged in
> to the Wine tree.
>
> Samba Cooperation - (Success) We have not fully ported samba however
> we have established a very positive relationship with the Samba and
> Samba-Tng developers and they seem very open to the idea of porting
> Samba to Windows so that in the future when ReactOS is ready it will
> provide a drop in solution. Elrond from Samba-tng has provided quite a
> bit of help and ported most of Samba-Tng to Windows already.
>
> Raising Awareness about ReactOS - (Success) When I joined no one had
> heard of us. Now almost any technical gathering I go to, 50 to 90% of
> the people attending are aware of our work. The GNU, Linux and BSD
> developers have for the most part changed their attitude regarding our
> project, its goals and future.
>
> Other uses of ReactOS - (Success) This has been the most surprising to
> me to watch. While we have not reached the ultimate goal we have seen
> fruits of our labor. The NDISWrapper teams come to us for questions
> which allows many Linux and BSD users to run Windows network card
> drivers. The CaptiveNTFS project created a more effective method of
> getting data from NTFS on to Linux. Many of the tools we have
> developed and ported are now being used in all sorts of places such as
> the FreeDOS port of command.com we reimplemented as cmd.exe has been
> ported to WinCE/PowerPC. Besides helping the NDISWrapper and Wine
> teams from time to time we are more and more becoming a source of
> information for educational purposes.
>
> So with all of that being said I am not planning on totally leaving
> however I mainly plan to help write regression tests for Wine in my
> spare time and hope that it helps ReactOS. I'm happy to help talk to
> people on behalf of the project and to help promote it in anyway I
> can. I think the next major thing I am going to try to do is visit
> Russia during a conference to meet with Fireball again and I am
> willing to continue to help mediate issues with Wine that may pop up.
> I still plan on hanging on IRC and the mailing list however I don't
> know how closely I will follow the list so if you need something email
> me directly.
>
> Thanks
>
> --
> Steven Edwards
>
> "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
> that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo