Rasterman leaves RedHat

poohbear_honeypot wrote in with the full text of Raster's letter to the mailing list, which is below. Essentially, Raster has left Red Hat for greener pastures, and (surprise, surprise) is headed West. He asks that people hold off on e-mailing for the next week or so. For the gory details, click below.

"From Rasterman on the Enlightenment Mailing List:

Well I thought I'd send this mail out now...

The short and curly:

As of friday the 28th of May I no longer work at Red Hat Software. The story is along ad will be explained sometime later - it's been brewing for months though.

I am now officially unemployed.

I am as happy as chickens in a seed farm.

As of tomorrow , June 1, 1999 I will be leaving North Carolina and moving west. I currently have no other employers.

This is all good for E and E development.

I am so glad to get out of ths creativity-stifling environemnt of RHAD LABS - away from certain people there who see E and its userbase as what I can literally quote them saying a "festering crowd".

I've tolerated this attitude towards E users for way too long. I do not envisage much future support from Red Hat for Enlightenment - they have been itching to get rid of E and will as soon as they can. I don't much care. They can do whatever they like - and I wish them all the best but I do not fit in there. E does not fit in there. They want a windows clone distribution and OS. I do not. They don't believe users really count - corporates and "partners" count and what they percieve as the "business world that wants an exact windows clone" counts.

I am not advocating changing distribtuions, but I am saying that this is onyl good for E - I will be freed up to concentrate on it and associated projects (that includes working on X and extensions to X). This also means i will be able to develop E free of GNOME. E is NOT GNOME's Window Manager - GNOME does not have one. Infact E will be workign to becoming its own desktop shell (I separate Desktop and Desktop Shell here for a reason) in its own right as time moves on - but unlike GNOME I won't make a vaporware publicity stunt out of it until there's something concrete there. E is getting on and a lot of important backend code is in place. After a few more necessary features it will start to grow into a desktop shell (a desktop shell is what I term the combination of Filemanager, Window manager and a Panel app launcher and an "applet/dock" holder). This means E is independant of whatvere desktop apps you use - you can use KDE apps, GNOME apps, GTK apps, X apps, Motif apps, CDE apps - whatever apps you like - but your desktop shell will be consistent and configurable to exactly how you want it. You alreayd knwo E's memory footprint is pretty small - especialyl compared to those of gnome and KDE (when you add the memory use of all the applets, panels, programs, wm etc. of each they add up to much much much more than E). E can absorb much of the functionality of these with very little overhead since it's already got the backend code there in E. Once the desktop shell for E is compleyte, debugged, optimised and so on E will hit 1.0 - but I'mnto setting a time limit on this - this happens when it's done and not before.

If you want to help: sit tight and stick to E - send good feedback and bug reports - We DO listen to them. Send patches to E if you want features. When the new dock applet apiu is done you can all scrutty off and write 5000 loadmeters, cd pplayers etc for E's new dock applet api (yes non square 64x64 dock apps - any size, anywhere (in the dragbar, in small windows, on the desktop istelf). all "dock applets" for E will follow the theme of the WM. This has yet to be worked on but will be - as well as adding in the iconbox again (that comes first).

Expect E to go far.

For the next week I'll be driving across the USA so dont' expect much response from me - after that I'll be moving into a new home, but therafter expect things to move along again.

I do hope we are doing things right by the majority of e users out there. You are my priority - not commerical interests, not political games, not a windows clone, not GNOME, not KDE - users come first. Those that help wiht the project get their wishes often done sooner than others becuase there aren't many working on E.

Here's to a bright future for Enlightenemnt and for all who use it.

-- --------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) [e-mail] Raster's Page [e-mail] "