[sldev] An announcement

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi everyone

I'm sad to announce that I've decided to leave Linden Lab.  My last
day is slated for November 13 (next Friday).

This has been quite an adventure!  I'm really proud of where the
community is today and its potential.  Over the years, this community
has attracted a lot of really stellar people who now form a great
team.  Snowglobe is off to a great start.  Things aren't perfect by
any stretch of the imagination (as anyone who tries to build with VS
2008 will testify), and there's all sorts of things that still need to
be done and need to improve, but things right now really aren't bad,
and there's a lot of great people around to make it better.  This
latest Snowglobe release is a great example of that, with 28 of the
100 direct commits in the 1.2 cycle (so far) coming from four
different non-Lindens, and many of the Linden commits being checkins
of contributed code from those that don't yet have commit access.
That's not to mention the swell of activity around alternative viewers
outside of Linden Lab.  I'm sure future versions of Snowglobe will
have even greater levels of non-Linden participation, and with any
luck, maybe even combine with one or two of the alternative viewer
efforts.

What does my departure mean for open source at Linden Lab?  Don't read
too much into it.  My departure is about my personal circumstances,
not about any abrupt change in direction on Linden's part.  My hope is
that this will make room for a fresh approach to our open development
work.  We're working on the general plan for my replacement now, which
you should all hear more details about soon.  I have no doubt that
Linden Lab will be able to attract more great people to augment the
talented and passionate team we already have working in the community,
and that the company will continue to develop its open source chops.

I'm going to hold a couple extra office hours next week in addition to
the normal 2pm Thursday one.  We'll keep the Thursday office hour in
Hippotropolis and text-only (typical Thursday), but the other two I'd
like to use voice + text (accommodating text only folks as best we
can), and hold them in the cubicle on the hill in Grasmere:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Grasmere/114/82/27

Agendas:
Monday, 2pm PST (Grasmere) - voice+text - informal gab/Q&A session
Wednesday, 8am PST (Grasmere) - voice+text - informal gab/Q&A session
Thursday, 2pm PST (Hippotropolis) - text only - advice for the future
of Snowglobe - we'll capture the transcript and save it off for the
future regime

As for what's next for me, I'm not yet in a position to talk about it.
 One thing I will say is that I'm definitely planning on staying in
open source development.

I'm going to miss working with you all as much as I do today, but I'll
still be around.  I'm going to get signed up for sldev@ on my personal
email address, log into IRC (though probably just as "robla") and I'll
weigh in from time-to-time.  I'll be sure to fill everyone in when I
land in my new spot.

Thanks for the ride!

Rob
p.s. now let's get Snowglobe 1.2 out the door ;-)   RC1 available now:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Download_Snowglobe