[scribus] My own small winter revolution...

[Gregory Pittman]

On 01/08/2013 11:28 AM, a.l.e wrote:
> Hi
> 
> If you've been reading this list for a while you must know about it: in
> the last few years I got more and more involved in the Scribus community
> and, more generally, in the world of free software for graphics. In 2013
> lot of things will be different! A "small revolution" -- for me -- that
> follows two unrelated events from the last few months of 2012.
> 
> The first event was Femke's announcement of the device for the LGM 2013:
> "Future tools". I must admit that my first reaction has been: "Where do
> you see any future tool?". Please, don't tell her. With the time I got
> used to it, started liking the idea and even got so far as collecting
> thoughts about Future tools for publishing. It's still just a bunch of
> wild ideas and all I currently know is: an Epub plugin for Scribus is
> not enough for the future of publishing. I wanted to dig further.
> 
> A bit later, towards the end of last year, we got an email from
> Christoph announcing  the plans for a release candidate of Scribus
> 1.5.0. Two things stroke me:
> - He plans one full year to get to a release candidate for a development
> version (after two and a half years of work on the branch!)
> - None of the features I care about were among the tasks to be achieved
> until then.
> 
> I started wondering if, with a year of work, a motivated team couldn't
> produce something that -- while obviously not being better than Scribus
> -- would better meet the publishing needs for many more people.
> 
> Short before the end of last year, I've taken the decision: During the
> next few months, I won't do any support nor community work for Scribus.
> I won't make sure that on the Mailing List and in the Forums questions
> are getting an answer. No checking of the new bug reports each morning.
> I won't be testing the new commits in the git branches or the svn trunk.
> And I won't keep an eye either on what's happening in the IRC channel.
> No, I won't disappear: but I will use those channels for my needs and
> won't be there to help other people with their sorrows.
> I will certainly finish the tasks I've started (the Epub plugin, the
> translation into Italian of the Scribus book, ...), but I want to
> reserve much more time for experimenting with new ideas and new
> technologies. More details will follow very soon! You're welcome to
> follow my adventures on Google+ and on the http://impagina.org/blog/ 
> (to be created).
> 
I wish you all the best with this. As I was saying some time ago,
sometimes radical rather than incremental changes or experiments need to
happen to make real progress.

Greg