After over two years of working on Redmine, I will be stepping down from my lead roles over the next few months. Without getting too deep into what happened, suffice it to say that I don’t agree with how Redmine is being led.
What does this decision mean for the Redmine core, my Redmine services, and plugins?
Redmine core:
- I may still contribute to the Redmine core, but only for my clients and my own personal benefit. Not on a daily basis like I have done in the past.
- I will be stepping down as the team leader from the Development, Plugin, and Community Relations teams.
- I will be stopping my refactoring of Redmine.
- I will not improve the Redmine API.
- I will not be managing the Redmine releses. This means that the 1.0.4 release (due 2010-11-28) and the 1.1.0 release (due 2010-12-31) will be released by someone else in the community.
- I will not be working on any more features or bug fixes for the core.
- I intend to maintain the github mirror of Redmine but that is also subject to change.
Redmine plugins:
- I will continue to maintain my current plugins.
- I expect that all of my plugins will become more active, as I will be devoting the 10 hours that I’ve been spending on the Redmine core every week specifically to them.
- I will release new versions of most of my plugins over the next few months.
My Redmine services:
- I will still provide Custom Development, Redmine Support, Redmine Setup, and all of the other services through Little Stream Software.
- I will continue to sell Refactoring Redmine since it merely uses Redmine as an example of a Ruby on Rails project.
- I will continue to run the Redmine Blog, though I might be changing the focus a bit.
- I will continue to run the Redmine demo site. While I pay for it out of my own pocket, I feel that the stable demo is an important tool for the community.
- I will maintain my own fork of Redmine for my clients. This will include patches from myself and the community that I feel should be applied to the Redmine core. I have yet to decide whether I will make this fork public or not.
What’s next?
I’m not going to drop all of my Redmine responsibilities overnight. I think disappearing from the community without any explanation is irresponsible, and a disservice to everyone who uses Redmine.
It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work and learn with the community on a project like this. Although I am sad to leave, I am thankful for the knowledge and experience. My greatest hope is that the project, and more importantly the community, have benefited from my hard work and effort. Thank you all for your support, and best wishes for the future.
Eric Davis
P.S. I am considering helping out another open source project. I’m not sure which one yet but if you run or are involved in one and would like some of my help, please let me know in the comments below.
This decision marks a black day for Redmine development. It is a shame to see you stepping-down from Redmine, although I can imagine your position and thus your decision.
Your contributions has improved Redmine in many ways. Thank you for the effort you have given to the Redmine project these years!
Kind regards,
Mischa The Evil.
Thanks Mischa. It’s going to be hard on me to be away from everyone in the community, I consider a lot of people there my close friends (like you). Maybe we will get the chance to work together on another project someday.
I don’t have any open or close sourced project to offer, but I’m going to write the following, just in case it helps.
On the purely technical level, your code looked good and I immediately agreed with your decisions 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, I had to learn some new stuff before agreeing.
From the eyes of my (very small) company, your contributions on redmine raised it from being “good” to being “excellent”. And I’m not talking about programming only; the community-oriented work was also very appreciated.
On a personal level, this makes me a bit sad. But you seem decided. If you think leaving Redmine will improve your life, then I support you, and wish you luck in your future endeavors.
I’m also curious. I’ll stick around to see what you end up doing.
An 80% agreement rate is great for me. I’m happy with 50%. :)
I’m hoping someone else will be able to step up and fill the community role I was working in. Now more than ever, Redmine needs a strong community in order to function.
This is a really sad news for everyone, your work was really moving Redmine forward.
You were writing a full disclosure about the conflicts and the background informations about the cause of this decision a few weeks ago, are you going to publish it for us (so we could fully understand what made you take this decision)?
Anyways I think you did a really great job with enhancing Redmine, and I admire what you’ve done with this project.
Best wishes for your next project,
Peter
I don’t know if I will be writing a full disclosure of the conflicts publicly. I’m fine with it being published (I’m pretty open with my opinions) but I think it will upset other parties in the conflict and publishing won’t improve the situation any. Maybe if enough people in the Redmine community ask for it and the other parties agree to it, we can publish it.
(In my opinion, this conflict should have been done publicly from the beginning but circumstances prevented it.)
Sad news indeed. :( I would like to know the reasons too.
For what it’s worth, I agree that any issues we have should be brought out and dealt with since right now it looks just about as bad as it possibly can: “community leader steps down from the project in the wake of un-disclosed circumstances.”
Surely more information could only help the situation. Redmine is a great tool and the community is great too, it’s just missing direction and leadership.
I’m hoping that it all comes out eventually, but I don’t want to be the one who starts it.
Thanks for all your contributions. We really like Redmine and conflicts are usually a bad sign for the overall project state. Would hate to see spin-offs.
I am very sad to see you turning your back on Redmine. I do hope, though, that your internal (?) fork will be appreciated and used as a source of ideas for Redmine core, once people realise how vital your contributions were over the last few years. Good luck with all your endeavours!
Thanks, we’ll have to see what happens next.
Hello,
It’s very sad to see you leaving. I would like to know the reason of conflict too. And I hope Redmine will not become into thousands of spin-offs.
As you were the main git repo of redmine (at least for me) and now you are going to shut it down (as I understood), can you share the scripts (if any) that you were using to sync repo with general repo of Redmine.
I don’t have any plans to shut down the git repo right now but it is a bit of a burden to keep running. I don’t have any custom scripts, I just configured a push to Github with cron: https://gist.github.com/675703
Thank you a lot for sharing the gist. And for all your commits – I have 7 plugins installed on my redmine instance, 6 of them were written by you! :)) I will write you a message via github about one redmine issue I’m wondering most of all and that you have abandoned now…
I might be able to take over the “official” github repo if you don’t want/haven’t the time to keep it running. Ping me if you want to pass it over.
I’ll keep you in mind.
The big problem is that I can’t use git tags for my own branches of Redmine because my script auto-syncs them.
Hey Eric, you can’t step down from redmine because (at least for me) you have become Redmine! Thanks for your great work!
I started a discussion “10 thoughts about redmine” in the redmine.org forum two years ago http://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/1646 Many of the things I’ve dreamed of have become true.
If you plan to fork the whole thing and do it the right way – just count me in!
Thanks but I like to think of Redmine as more than one person. It’s grown bigger than myself or any other single contributor. It’s a full community now.
This is a sad news. Why not just fork and let the community to decide?
Forking would take too much effort me right now.
Good luck. From my point of view, you made Redmine grow to be a community. I think we’ve used Redmine for over 3 years and the improvements to Redmine over the last 2 years have been fantastic. Thank you so much and best wishes.
Thanks. It makes me feel better to know that someone else saw the improvements I was trying to make.
Improvements? Are you kidding? My feeling when I started using redmine (at the beginning of railsbridge) was that you was the owner of the project, given the amount of work I’ve seen you did.
Thanks for improving this important tool – you’ve made difference.
About the dispute, full disclosure would be ideal, especially given hudson ci project is in troubles too.
I can only repeat what others said already before: you made Redmine what it is today, so naturally this is a big loss for all of us.
I was thinking about contributing myself, but didn’t find the time due to too many personal projects going on all the time. I am still quite interested in what made you decide that way? There haven’t been any (public) signs for your decision, as far as I can tell as a user.
Good luck, Eric, even though I’m sure you won’t need it. :)
Thanks, I’ll be alright once things get back to normal.
There is a thread on the Redmine.org forums about this but so far I’m the only contributor who has said anything (though I know others are aware of it). Hopefully there will be some more talk there over the next few weeks.
http://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/19875
Googl luck, Eric!
I had replied earlier, but something must have fowled up (I was using my phone).
Radiant is always looking for good input, but you’ll find a way to be happy no matter what, I’m sure.
How is Radiant doing? I haven’t used it for about a year now (haven’t needed a CMS).
doing well; we have a pretty solid team. we need to close out some bugs, lock it down, release, and move to Rails 3 (which is in the works).
Good luck, I’ll have to check it out once I’ve rested a bit.
And good luck if you’ve moved to engines for your plugins already. Rails 3.0 and 3.1 changed them so it might be a bumpy upgrade path. Last we decided, Redmine wasn’t going to Rails 3.0 and was going to wait for 3.1 (and still might need to patch Rails).
sad to see you go. Redmine is honestly one of the best pieces of opensource software out there. Its well designed and a pleasure to use. If only more software were like redmine. Thank you for making this happen. I wish whatever was happening somehow could be resolved so you can come back.